Penning Ideas and Sketches in One Commonplace Book with @ellbrt

For more photos of Ellina’s fountain pens and personal reference books, follow @ellbrt on Instagram.

Sure, all a writer needs is a pen and some paper, but Ellina T. (@ellbrt), a student living in France, finds far more joy in the writing process when she has one of her beloved fountain pens in hand. “A fountain pen really becomes a part of you the more you use it and take care of it. That’s why I’m so attached to my collection,” she says. Ellina pulls out one of her 20 fountain pens to take notes in class, but where the ink really pours is in her “commonplace book.” “Historically, a commonplace book is a way to record what a person learns and reads throughout their life,” she says. “My notebook contains all the things I find interesting in life or online — quotes from books, recipes, interviews with people, Spanish words, programming language syntax, anything. It’s my personal reference book.” She also writes down ideas that pop into her head and paints or sketches the things that surround her. “I put no limitations on things that can go into my notebook. It’s an ‘anything and everything’ notebook for me.”

The Art of @gangsterdoodles Features Rappers on Post-Its

To see more Post-it note art from Marlon, check out @gangsterdoodles on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

Plenty of people toil away at their day jobs thinking about all the other things they could be doing, but few make good on it — then again, not everyone has skills with a Sharpie like Marlon Sassy. The 29-year-old Vancouver, British Columbia, resident is the hand behind the popular account @gangsterdoodles, which features Post-it note sketches of rappers, actors and assorted pop culture iconography.

“Anything people needed, they’d come to me,” Marlon explains of the 9-year stint he spent as an office manager at a Canadian television production company, where he first began the work that is now being celebrated by the likes of Questlove and Tyler, The Creator, among others. “It was menial stuff — make some coffee, make some calls for people. It gave me a lot of flexibility to do what I wanted to do during the day.”

What Marlon wanted was an outlet for his visual art — paintings and drawings — which he made when he came home from work. The film school grad had already had a gallery show and found the traditional art scene unsettling. “Everyone is going, ‘What does this mean, what does that mean?’” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘I dunno, it’s a cool picture. That’s it.’ And then they go, ‘What do you mean, it doesn’t have a deeper meaning?’ And I’m like, ‘Not really.’”

He needed something else, something faster and more amenable to his “it’s not that deep” sensibility. Three years ago, using markers and Post-it notes, he began making quick five-minute drawings when he had free time at work. Slick Rick. Nicki Minaj. Lil Wayne. Radio Raheem. Childish Gambino. A$AP Yams. Others. Lots of others. All aquamarine and violets against soft yellow, they were imperfect enough to be amateur, but professional enough to pop.

“I posted a picture every day for a year and a half, not missing a day,” he says. “I still try to do that. I like doing it. It gives me something to do.”

It’s not like he doesn’t have the time. Last October, after selling a handful of prints and releasing two volumes of his collected works through art publisher Valley Cruise Press, he finally had enough money to quit his day job. Now, between commissioned work and the upcoming release of this third book, due in October, he’s drawing new art every day and focusing much more on merchandise — T-shirts, prints and pins.

“I like having control over what I’m doing,” he says. “You can sell your own stuff, make money off of it and you’re not answering to anyone. You make stuff, people buy it, that’s cool; if not, that’s cool too. I’m not making huge money so it’s not like I’m living in the lap of luxury. But I like this better than my old job. That means more than making a ton of cash. For me, it’s a way of becoming free.”

—Paul Cantor for Instagram @music

#LocalLens: Finding Peace in the Islands of Okinawa with @sesokomasayuki

In this series, local Instagrammers show you their favorite places to shoot around where they live. To see more photos of Okinawa taken by Masayuki, follow @sesokomasayuki on Instagram.

This interview was conducted in Japanese.

After years of working long days and sleepless nights as an editor for a small publishing company in Tokyo, Masayuki Sesoko (@sesokomasayuki) decided to rethink the way he lived his life. He became an independent editor, packed up his things and moved to the southernmost island prefecture of Okinawa. And now, three years later, Masayuki shares some of his favorite spots to capture in the place where he started fresh for this edition of #LocalLens. “Okinawa is an area for resorts as well as for living,” he says. “Although it’s a part of Japan, it feels like another country in Asia, while also having an American feel.” The scenes he enjoys capturing the most are the tropical landscapes, artisan cafes, bakeries and the peaceful time out with his family. “Be it the sea, the sky, the flowers, the food — the southern islands are filled with vibrant colors and are incredibly photogenic. There are many great places to shoot, such as the ‘Tropical Beach’ in Ginowan, Kurima island, and cafes like ‘Kissa Niwatori’ and ‘Cafe Koku,’” says Masayuki. “For me, Okinawa is all about the abundant nature, the comfortable distance between people and the slow passing of time. I hope that my photos provide a sense of serenity to the people who see them.”

#todayimet with Singer Troye Sivan and Rapper Tkay Maidza

To see more photos of Troye and Tkay, check out @troyesivan and @tkaymaidza on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

Singer Troye Sivan (@troyesivan) recorded “DKLA” (aka “Don’t Keep Love Around”) on a farm an hour outside of Sydney, at one of those all-encompassing studios where musicians go and live for a few days to work on their music. Bringing along two producers from his hometown of Perth, along with Alex, his songwriting partner, Troye had the same goal he always had going into a new project: write the best track he could.

“The boys were in the one room making a beat and they gave us some chords and then Alex and I went into the next room and started writing, and Alex came up with this one phrase, ‘Don’t Keep Love Around,’ and it just sounded like a beautiful story of somebody who had been hurt and just decided it was time to give up on love,” says Troye.

The rest of “DKLA” came together organically — additional synths, a syncopated beat — with Troye recording his vocals at 1 a.m. Still, it was missing something, and the song languished on his computer for a couple months before he knew what it needed.

“I started muttering under my breath while I was listening to it and was like, ‘Ah, it needs a rapper, it needs a female rapper. And it needs Tkay Maidza,‘” recalls Troye. “I am just such a huge fan of hers. I mean, it was a big ask. I am always gobsmacked when anyone is interested in doing anything I want to do. But we reached out and within two days she sent back this demo of her doing the rap into her laptop, and it was so sick and so good and so perfect and exactly how I’d hoped the verse would sound so she went into the studio a couple days later and put it down.”

Funny enough, it would be several months before the two would actually meet in person, which they finally did, this September, at a coffee shop in Sydney. For Troye, it was more than just meeting a collaborator — it felt like spending time with a good friend.

“She’s absolutely teeny-weeny and adorable and the sweetest person ever and such a talent,” says Troye, about Tkay (@tkaymaidza). “I definitely think there is something so personal about making music and we had done it long-distance, so to be able to meet and have this shared experience of this song on my EP, it’s just really, really cool. It’s a weird connection. It feels like we’ve known each other a lot longer than the hour we got to chill.”

The finished track fits perfectly within Troye’s EP Wild, which has been picking up accolades since its release earlier this month, including one from the Queen of Pop herself, Taylor Swift, who recently tweeted her approval.

“Oh my god, dude, it was like 1 a.m. I was walking home from a bar, and my friend, I literally thought someone had died from the face he had when he saw his phone because he saw it first,” says Troye. “I hardly slept that night. I also think [Taylor] was purposely messing with me because I didn’t get over it, but I was calmed down, and just as I was about to fall asleep she tweeted me again, like hours later. So I was like, now she’s definitely trying to rile me up.”

The feeling was cyclical for Troye, as Taylor’s 1989 came out a few weeks before he wrote Wild, and ended up being a major influence for him. While he’s now hard at work on finishing his first full-length record, he’s increasingly proud of the world he has crafted on the current EP — “DKLA” in particular.

“‘DKLA’ for me is such an important part of the EP as a whole, because the lyrics are really poetic — they are some of my favorite lyrics on the whole project,” he says. “I think it brings this mood to the whole body of work. It’s one of the coolest songs that I have ever written.”

—Instagram @music

@marigiudicelli on Walking in the @eckhaus_latta Show and Capturing its Details in Photographs

To see more of Mari’s photographs, follow @marigiudicelli on Instagram.

Minimal still life compositions aren’t the typical photos that models share from backstage. But Mari Giudicelli (@marigiudicelli) wanted to capture what she calls “less obvious” moments at this week’s Eckhaus Latta runway show in New York. “I try to show the real thing and how it’s not all glamour,” the 27-year-old from Brooklyn says. Eckhaus Latta (@eckhaus_latta), a four-year-old house led by Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus, cast professionals like Mari to walk the runway alongside artists such as Juliana Huxtable and Dev Hynes. “Eckhaus is definitely my favorite for their creativity,” Mari says. “The sculptural aspect of the clothes is really incredible. The industry needs more designers like them.”

Backstage and beyond, Mari’s photos are full of quirk and life. “I try to capture interesting compositions on diverse life situations such as artists’ studios and on the street.”

Magical Realism in Daily Life with @stephenedwardferry

To see more of Stephen’s striking pictures from Bogota and elsewhere, follow @stephenedwardferry on Instagram.

From a young age, Stephen Ferry (@stephenedwardferry) was well aware not only of photography’s appeal, but of its power.

“I’m pretty lucky because when I was really quite young, 12 or 13 years old, there was a photography store around the corner from my house, and they put up with me,” the 55-year-old photojournalist says. “I went there all the time and they showed me how to develop film and stuff. At the same time, when I was young, the war in Vietnam was a huge issue everywhere. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there were riots and demonstrations against the war all the time. I learned about all of this through the photographs that came to our house in newspapers and in the pages of LIFE magazine. Those are the same extraordinary pictures that really had an influence on American society. I was already very interested in the news, and that was an occasion where photojournalism showed me that photographs can influence the course of things and play a role in informing people and exposing terrible things that were taking place.”

While he has traveled to dozens of countries in his career — covering armed conflicts, human rights and the environment — for the past decade and a half Stephen has been living in Colombia. Electing Bogota as a base for his work was a decision driven, paradoxically enough, by what he did not know: namely, how complex and fascinating his adopted country really is.

“I first came here to give a workshop to Latin American photographers in the late 1990s,” Stephen notes. “As it turns out, through their pictures, my colleagues in the workshop taught me a lot about the war that is taking place in Colombia and the human rights situation here. I didn’t really understand the gravity of it and the scale of it back then. I had always worked on issues of human rights, so at that point I decided I wanted to cover the unrest in this country — particularly because there’s this notion that the violence here stems only from issues around drug trafficking. The easy, simplistic idea that people often have is that this is a drug war, but it’s much, much more involved than that. Like so many places, Colombia’s conflict has long and deep historical roots. I set myself the task of trying to convey that, and it turned out to be far more complicated than I ever imagined.”

For someone who has seen much of the worst that human beings can inflict on one another, a strong streak of optimism (colored by, in Stephen’s words, “a lot of sadness”) remains in his approach to his work.

“One of the things that I really want to pursue as a photographer is to keep covering and communicating around the difficult subjects of conflict and violence, but also explore the many aspects of daily life, a kind of magical realist quality to life, that I find so wonderful here in Colombia,” Stephen says.

His profession, meanwhile, demands a certain amount of sacrifice. “I’m a photojournalist,” he says. “Certainly, I obey all the rules of the profession. Never set things up, don’t make false statements in captions, and so forth. But when you’re looking at awful things taking place in front of you, of course you hope that your pictures will wake people up, or will create a sense of concern. And on a few occasions there’s been the satisfaction of knowing that the work has actually helped to cast a strong light on these conflicts, and maybe even made things a little better.”

Questioning National Identities with @nacoart

For more ‘naco’ art, questions on national identities and popular culture references in the US and Mexico, follow @nacoart on Instagram.

Ricardo Gonzalez (@nacoart), grew up feeling like he didn’t belong in his surroundings. Born in Chicago to Mexican parents, he quickly discovered that he didn’t fit the cultural expectations of either side of the border. But as soon as he started to devote himself to art, he began to use his paintings as a way to question national identities, misconceptions and cultural stereotypes.

That’s how Ricardo’s ‘naco’ art, full of popular culture references, was born. “Naco is a lowbrow term, but I thought it was a good fit to question what is high art or low art and really question authenticity in art — and in my own ethnicity, too,” he says. Ricardo also paints pop references from his childhood — everything from comic book characters to toys. “Just as I am critical about culture and the world surrounding me, I am also comical and light-hearted,” he says. “If it wasn’t for those things I wouldn’t have been interested in art. For me, it’s part of my humor and being a kid.”

The US celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 through October 15, which Ricardo, who now considers himself a “Mexican-American,” says is an opportunity to “project our own culture, our own celebrations — and hopefully do it in our own terms.”

New Realms of Music with Artist @sarahfimm

To see more of Sarah’s many forms of art, follow @sarahfimm on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

Artist Sarah Fimm (@sarahfimm) doesn’t like to describe her work in terms of any one particular style or genre. “I’m just not a ‘favorites’ kind of person,” she says. “I want to make something that moves someone into a new realm, that takes them on some kind of internal journey.”

For Sarah, that journey includes everything from music to poetry to painting. A graduate of the Berklee College of Music with 12 albums to her name, she now resides in Woodstock, New York, where she’s currently working on two new records and keeping up her many mediums of expression – sometimes in the same moment. “There’s an orchestra from Macedonia,” says Sarah. “We had to record them in a basement in Woodstock at 4 o'clock in the morning. At the same time, I was sewing together 5,000 mirrors and 500 solar lights so we could have this massive installation over the course of a month at the Bearsville Theater. And then we had a show and we raised $3,000.”

Sarah says the inspiration for her art, no matter the form, comes from a desire to connect with people and support others to “abandon their weights and dive into their dreams.” Take for instance the Karma Phala Music Project she began in 2010, in which she delivered her own music and art on jump drives for free to anyone interested — so long as they passed it forward after listening. “And I thought, ‘This is a way to just connect with people and show them that if they share the music, that if they share it consciously, that can be very meaningful,’” says Sarah. “So it was an experiment, and it was one that turned out to be very illuminating.”

—Instagram @music

Celebrating the Start of the Jewish New Year with Israeli Food Bloggers @matkonation

Follow @matkonation on Instagram to see more beautiful and creative dishes.

It’s Rosh Hashana, the start of the Jewish New Year. And, like many Jewish people around the world, Israeli food bloggers Deanna Linder and Danya Weiner (@matkonation) are celebrating — and eating — with their families. Deanna is a food stylist, Danya is a food photographer, and the two joined forces six years ago to channel their creativity in a fun way. “Together the two of us have five boys, and as working moms, we’re really appreciating this time we have to reflect with our boys on the new year to come,” says Deanna.

The two moms’ collaboration has led to big opportunities, like a recent photo shoot for a major brand where they made this dish: fresh figs baked and stuffed with goat cheese and a balsamic crumble, meant to be served at the upcoming holiday Sukkot, a celebration of the harvest season. “For the new year, we would like to let everyone know that Israel (especially Tel Aviv) is a major hub of creativity, liveliness and really, really good food,” Deanna says, with an offer to hit them up for the best places to eat.

Weekend Hashtag Project: #WHPartifacts

Weekend Hashtag Project is a series featuring designated themes and hashtags chosen by Instagram’s Community Team. For a chance to be featured on the Instagram blog, follow @instagram and look for a post announcing the weekend’s project every Friday.

This weekend’s prompt was #WHPartifacts, which asked participants to tell stories through photographs of personal artifacts that hold great meaning to them. Every Monday we feature some of our favorite submissions from the project, but be sure to check out the rest here.