My Story

Hello, I'm Eun - the artist behind Nole Creative.

I grew up in South Korea and moved to NYC in my early 20's to study. Experiencing two drastically different cultures and seeing a wide scope of the world has formed my design aesthetics of finding harmony between bold elements and quiet white space.

After a decade of working as a graphic designer for larger organizations, I started my own design studio, which gave me the opportunity to define my own style and work with some amazing clients. As my business grew, I realized that I longed to somehow fully express my personal creativity. 

 

Then the catalyst —

My husband suggested we quit our jobs and travel the world for a year. My first reaction was absolutely not. With a 1 and 3 year old, I don’t think so. But after a couple of months it became clear it was something we could and should do to reinvigorate our lives and creativity. Surprisingly we manage to reduce our things into two suitcases and with that we were off to the other side of the world.

 

 

1 Year, 2 Kids, 13 Countries

The more countries we explored, the more we learned about ourselves and each other. Our kids have proven to be more resilient than we ever hoped. Most importantly, we’ve accumulated countless precious memories country by country.

We can’t say we enjoyed every minute of our travels. We had and continue to have our uncertainties - where would we settle down and how would we make ends meet after we completed our travels? We experienced a lot of sick days with our daughter on top of the stress of adapting to new environments, which made everyone exhausted resulting in small and big arguments alike. What helped was to change my attitude towards uncertainties from anxiety to excitement about the possibilities our unknown future held.

 

 

Like any life disrupting experience, our trip opened my life to new opportunities and truly inspired me creatively. I discovered my passion for drawing. Each place we visited with its unique culture and landscape inspired me to tell its stories through drawing. I also learned to find humanity and the simple beauty of nature that nourishes us in all that surrounded me.

 

About my art

Nole Creative is my platform to share travel-inspired landscape illustrations incorporating graphic design components and a minimalist style. Here's a glimpse at my creative process - I first admire the surrounding environment and attempt to capture its essence and beauty with my digital pen. With overall harmony in composition in mind, I like to have elements of surprise, whether it's exaggeration of certain components or unexpected color combinations. The act of drawing itself is a big part of my creative process as well and I embrace spontaneity that happens as I create.

Our mission at the beginning of our trip was to - “take career breaks to explore the world as we travel with young kids, disrupt our lives and pursue our strongest passions”. And we achieved just that. Our travels helped find my dormant passion for illustrations, and it has become my biggest joy to share my art with others and have it become a meaningful part of their collections.