Today we’d like to introduce you to Elvera Goedhart and Carlijn Seves.
Hi Elvera and Carlijn, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Carlijn and I (Elvera) met in artschool, in Zwolle, Netherlands. We studied Illustration (department Stories & Design) and graduated in 2011.
By then, we were close friends. Carlijn started a business in Graphic Design and Elvera in Illustration and a few years later, when we both had our first child, we wondered if it would be a good idea to create something together.
We had weekly binge watch & wine dates, and playdates with the kids and we thought we might as well test our creative compatibility.
We made a print together and we loved it. Carlijn’s more graphic approach and Elvera’s illustrative approach combined well together and we started creating more, just thinking of images we wanted to create and not thinking about what we wanted to do with them. When we had created about five images, we send them to different print & demand shops such as Juniqe, and they were accepted.
Of course, by then we had to come up with a name, but nothing sounded quite right. After long consideration, we decided to merge the names of our personal businesses, (Carlijn had BlauMaschine en Elvera had Elvera Goedhart Illustrations, rather dull as that is simply her name, but her name means Goodheart so it’s also pretty), and it became Goed Blauw. It translates into English as Great Blue.
That’s how it started, and since then we made a lot of prints and postcards. Since this year we officially started a company together and expanded our field of work. We do illustrations for books and magazines and even for animations. All kinds of commissioned work. Our own webshop ins in development. It’s really exciting to see our business grow!
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Our collaboration was and is a smooth one, the more difficult thing is to find the right market to sell your products. You make all these artworks and products, but how do you get them to “the people?”
We’re not a household name yet and when we make something new people are not standing in line to acquire it. Social media can be a great medium to help with this, but platforms such as Instagram can still be complicated to navigate when you want a professional account that gathers lots of followers and likes.
Algorithms change all the time, and it can be an extra job just to keep up with the strategic way of posting. We both have three kids and work part-time so it’s tough to do all of this marketing stuff next to the actual creating.
This is something you try to figure out along the way, and it can take longer when you do not have the luxury of smacking a pile of money at it for advertising and stuff like that.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Goed Blauw?
The thing about our work is that it is a great combination between graphic design and illustration. We combine our personal strengths into one piece of art and it just works.
Also, we are color-enthusiasts and that is a great part of our signature. We started out making artwork for children’s rooms because we often found it difficult to find colorful and imaginative art for our own kids’ rooms. So our focus was on creating art that set us aside from other prints you could already find. Now we have expanded our line of work with more commissioned work etc, we still pay a lot of attention to color palettes.
The great thing is we have a lot of artwork to choose from, but we always love to personalize our work, for example, add names and birthdates to posters for personal gifts, or create something entirely new and personalized.
Very soon our webshop will be online at goedblauw.nl, and there will be a lot more possibilities to choose from than the Etsy Shop we wield right now.
But people can always contact us directly via our website or Instagram!
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
We share a love for beautiful art books that inspire, and we keep up with a lot of artists and love seeing their creation process. There is always something to learn from someone else’s process.
Before Covid, we were volunteers at the BNO (Organisation for Dutch Designers) and we helped organize inspirational evenings where designers from every corner of the field (illustrators, animators, design bureaus, game designers, etc.) were invited to speak about their work process.
We hope to resume these meetings in the future, it gives a creative boost to watch and hear someone talk about their work with passion and share in their journey. We also take the occasional course in specific art mediums, for example, we followed a gouache course with fellow illustrators from Topcursus, and a digital art course from Asia Orlando via Domestika.
This way we keep expanding our knowledge of the mediums we already work with, there is always more to explore!
Pricing:
- Postcards – 1,50 euros
- Posters A3 – 15 euros
- Posters A4 – 10 euros
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: goedblauw.nl
- Instagram: instagram.com/goedblauw
- Facebook: facebook.com/goedblauw
- Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/GoedBlauw
Image Credits
Tara Middag
