#user feature

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Carnival Goes to Our Head with Fernanda Guimarães’ Designs

This feature is part of #MadeToCreate, a series highlighting our community of entrepreneurs, makers and artisans on Instagram. Discover more stories from Brazil on @instagrambrasil.

(This interview was conducted in Portuguese.)

A sunflower, a unicorn’s horn, a piece of tropical fruit and a newborn chick are some of the elements Brazilian designer Fernanda Guimarães (@cancanacessorios) has combined to create her imaginative head ornaments, often worn during Brazil’s Carnival celebrations. “Female strength inspires me,” the 32-year-old says. “I want my work to empower women, and it’s amazing to be able to create head ornaments that will remind women that they are all goddesses and queens.” Although Fernanda’s creations are a result of her vivid imagination, her creative process starts in real life: “I travel to places where head ornaments are part of the culture, and I am constantly researching women’s fashion and old vintage costumes, especially from the 1920s.”

Fernanda started her business eight years ago, but her love of Carnival dates back to when she was just 3 years old. “My mom took me to a party where all the kids were beautiful and looked just like cartoon characters,” she remembers.

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Memories Without Detail: @willwhipple’s ‘Gist’ Project

For more from Will’s Gist project, follow @willwhipple on Instagram.

Photographer Will Whipple (@willwhipple) hopes his blurry photos take you on a trip down memory lane. His “Gist” project was born while editing some photos from Greece; a blurry test shot of a street immediately transported him to the road he grew up on in a small town in California. “My eyes kind of tricked me, and my mind just went with the tricks, and it made me start to think about the whole interpretation process of images that goes on subconsciously,” he explains. Will deliberately changes his focus and opens the aperture during shooting to blur out details, whether he’s on a commercial shoot or at the beach with his family. “By taking the detail out of it, it becomes more of a memory, because a lot of our memories are lacking in detail as well,” he says. He aims to ask the viewer not, “what is this of?” but rather, “where does this take you?” — whether that be a family holiday, the work commute or an old friendship. “It forces the viewer to be conscious of the interpretation process of photography,” he says.

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Drawing the Amusing Side of Life with @mahjorth

For more of Malin’s amusing drawings of life, follow @mahjorth on Instagram.

For Malin Hjorth (@mahjorth), drawing is a way to represent the amusing situations of life. A project manager at a kitchen company in Oslo, Norway, by day, Malin’s playful images are of collages of hand-drawn figures mixed with real-life objects or photos from interior and fashion magazines in delightful compositions. “I start out with no idea, then I start drawing. I cut out the figure or object and place it on the wall or at a photo. When composing my photo I think of the light, and of the shadow my objects are creating,” Malin says.

Malin’s inspirations include the artist David Hockney, her grandmother and people on the morning bus. “For one year I was an exchange student at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, and one teacher said to me, ‘Malin, stop talking! Start drawing!’ And I did!”

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Sending Letters of Beauty with #envelope_series

For more from Anna’s envelope series, follow @annaremarchuk and browse the #envelope_series hashtag on Instagram.

Not long after Kiev-based photographer Anna Remarchuk (@annaremarchuk) found a bunch of old envelopes that belonged to her great-grandfather, she received a gift of snowdrops in the post. “At the table there were those envelopes. I saw them together and decided to make a photo,” she says. The simple combination gave birth to a new creative project — the #envelope_series.

Anna buys the flowers or receives them as gifts, then looks at the colors and tones of the envelope paper and the natural beauty of the flowers before shooting her pairings on her phone. “During the process I forget about all, because I am in love with what I do,” she says. “I want my followers to be able to understand my flowers’ message without any words.”