This calendar became a bridge between graphite and watercolor.

A busy schedule with other projects meant I couldn't create an entirely new calendar from scratch. Instead, I decided to bring together both older and newer works, combining watercolor paintings with graphite drawings. The idea of framing every illustration within a circle came from an old illuminated manuscript that inspired me.

The title appeared only after all the pages had been completed. I named the calendar Nautilus, after Captain Nemo's submarine from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas—one of my favorite books as a child.

The circular frames began to resemble portholes, as if the viewer were looking out from inside a vessel at a beautiful and mysterious world beyond. To be honest, with everything that was happening in the world at the time, creating exactly that feeling became important to me—a quiet place from which to keep looking at beauty.