How travelling with nothing but pencils and a notepad helped Harriet Yakub tackle her fear of a blank page

Recently, after three years spent living in the Netherlands, the illustrator Harriet Yakub decided it was high time to move back to her home town of Dublin. But, before she moved back, she thought she’d make the most of the transitional period; she quit her job, let go of her lease and took herself travelling around East Asia. The period would be a welcome chance for Harriet to step back from the day-to-day of a creative career working as an illustrator and in a branding design office, and a moment to reacquaint herself with one of the most instinctual set-ups for an illustrator – pencil on paper.

Harriet purposefully packed very limited materials: a pencil case filled with Prismacolour pencils, a sharpener, a notebook and a rubber that only removed light strokes. “I didn’t want to bring too much with me, but wanted to ground myself in physical work as I’d been yearning for it for a long time,” says Harriet. This restriction also helped her to tackle and overcome one of her big creative fears – a blank page. “Sometimes when I look at a blank page I feel like I have too much opportunity and then do nothing,” Harriet says. “With a different view every day and no choice of materials except for the pencils in hand, it lessened that pressure.”

This didn’t assuage all moments of uncertainty, however. Harriet recalls feeling tentative when starting the notebook, a mindset she believes you can see change as the notebook progresses. “I was quite nervous to start, cautious with strokes and colours and afraid I’d ruin a page. It didn’t have the energy of my digital work, but it had something new and I wanted to get to know it. The notebook starts off light, sparse and disjointed,” says Harriet. But, further in, the pages fill, the colour becomes more bold and the sense of hesitation is lost. “It just took practice and learning to trust myself again,” she adds. The notebook opens with a spread of stickers and stamps Harriet collected from fruit, shops and festivals during her travels, before turning into drawings of sandy Korean beaches, streetside signs and symbols in Taiwan and brightly-lit convenience stores in Japan.

One moment from the notebook that has stayed with Harriet was depicting a group of young school girls travelling on Tokyo’s metro. Having noticed Harriet drawing them, the young girls started playing a game of peek-a-boo, looking out from behind their school hats. Understandably, Harriet wanted to capture the moment – “but felt like a creep to take a photo” – so she resorted to drawing each kid one by one, catching different emotions and moments in the group’s lighthearted game. “The drawing is rough and mostly gestural, but in that moment I felt like I unlocked the sense that things don’t have to be picture perfect,” Harriet says. “I didn’t always get the faces right, but I captured the feeling.” Harriet’s distinctive technique of layering lots of lines gives each drawing energy, enhancing the sense that each is a still snapshot of a moment in motion.

On reflection, Harriet sees the notebook as a visualisation of the time and space she had to look inward. “Looking back at what I chose to draw, it felt like my personal collection of moments, things I picked out of millions I saw and thousands of pictures I took. I only had so many pages and so much time, so I captured my top things,” says Harriet. “In that, I started to see myself and got to know what I like on a deeper level.” Back in Dublin and working back in a branding office, Harriet (inspired by her time away) is also now renting a personal studio space to continue working physically, and maybe soon even at large scale – a perfect way to keep that analogue fire burning.