In a compact apartment-studio in Gothenburg, Sweden, the living room doubles as both dinner table and art desk – a cozy space where brushes, gouache paint, and scissors share shelf space with mugs and grocery bags. From this humble corner of domestic life emerges a creative world full of whimsy, warmth, and color: the world of painter, designer, and children’s-book author Josefin Norlin.
Josefin Norlin is known online under the handle @josefin_norlin, where she shares glimpses of her visual works: bright, naïve, and alive with everyday magic. Her pieces often depict plants, simple domestic objects, and scenes that evoke the softness of childhood memory. Her illustrations and prints blur the boundary between fine art and illustration, combining gouache, watercolor, ink, and vinyl paint on paper, and sometimes branching into textile, wood, and clay.
But Norlin’s creative ambition extends beyond standalone prints. She is also the author and illustrator of children’s picture-books; a genre where her playful aesthetic, gentle storytelling, and heartfelt themes find perfect expression.
Roots in Creativity and a Childhood of Color
Norlin’s journey into art was anything but predetermined. Growing up in Gothenburg, she was shaped by parents who lived and breathed creation: her father hand-painted store signs and designed window displays; her mother ran a coffee shop filled with purple-hued interiors and hosted poetry readings, theater evenings, political discussions – turning a humble café into a portal of imagination and community. Those experiences, she says, made her believe anything is possible if you work hard enough.
As a teenager, Norlin experimented with drawing, sculpture, and collage – a restless exploration of media and form. But after art school she left full-time art behind for a job in retail design and visual merchandising, for many years thinking her art-making days were behind her.
Then grief struck in her twenties, when she lost both parents within a short interval. The loss halted her creative output for a time. Yet from that pause came a reawakening. She realized that suppressing the urge to create denied a part of herself. She returned to art, embracing a philosophy of creative restlessness: rather than limit herself to one medium, she decided to explore them all. Canvas, paper, fabric, clay, nothing would be off-limits.
A Style That Bridges Art, Memory, and Story
What distinguishes Norlin’s work is not only its whimsical style: naive lines, bold colours, everyday motifs – but also its emotional honesty and sense of intimacy. A leaf, a jar, a simple room corner: in her hands, even the mundane becomes a doorway to memory, childhood, and quiet reflection. On her Printler page, she describes her visual language as “naïve with strong colours and original details.”
Her mixed-media works: gouache, watercolor, ink, vinyl paint on paper – often combine texture, flatness, and spontaneity. The technique gives her paintings a handcrafted warmth, resisting the slick perfection of digital art. She works at the same table where family meals are shared and homework is done: a living reminder that art and life, creation and everyday, are inseparable.
Her style is versatile: sometimes whimsical and dreamlike, sometimes domestic and grounded. Plants, objects, rooms, introspective figures: recurring motifs evoke safety, longing, nostalgia, and wonder. For many viewers, her art feels like a memory half-forgotten or a dream just at the edge of wakefulness.
Making Books for Little Readers – and Big Emotions
In 2022, Norlin published a children’s picture book titled Jättestora Liten: “Giant-Big Little” – under the Swedish imprint Idus Förlag. The book follows a small character, “Liten,” who dreams of being big instead of little. The story delves into familiar childhood feelings: mischief, courage, sorrow, and the longing to grow, or just be seen.
The book is aimed at children 0–3 years old, and through simple everyday situations and gentle language, it teaches concepts like opposites (big/small) and the power of emotional validation, that being small or big, bold or shy, full of energy or needing comfort are all okay.
For Norlin, writing and illustrating children’s books is more than a side-project: it’s an expression of her belief in storytelling’s power to comfort, teach, and connect. Her art for children doesn’t shy away from emotional depth: there is vulnerability, softness, and honesty. In a world saturated with commercial animation and bright, loud media, her gentle, reflective style stands out as a reminder of simplicity, kindness, and empathy.
Life, Illness, Art: A Story of Resilience
Norlin’s path to becoming a full-time artist and designer was not linear, nor was it easy. Alongside her visual-merchandising career, she juggled personal grief after her parents died, self-doubt, and eventually a serious illness. She has spoken openly about being diagnosed with cancer, a challenge that forced her to slow down, prioritize health, and balance creative ambition with self-care.
Yet even in the hardest times, she continued creating – albeit at a different pace. A commission to illustrate a new children’s book served as a lifeline, a reason to pick up the brush again. She admits working slowly, worrying about productivity, guilt over downtime, but also cherishing each stroke, each page completed. The result is work infused with authenticity, pain, hope – art that remembers life in full spectrum.
For many followers and admirers, that honesty of struggle, grief, recovery, perseverance, adds emotional weight to her colorful, child-like visuals. It transforms her art from decoration into diary, from images into empathy.
Living Creativity: Art as Everyday, Not Exception
Norlin doesn’t work in a separate “studio”, she works in the “table of life.” Between meals, laundry, family time, she paints, sketches, collages. That merging of ordinary life with creative work reflects an implicit ethos: art is not luxury, art is life.
Her practice is instinctive and adaptive: one day a gouache painting; the next, a textile piece; then maybe clay, maybe collage. She moves freely between disciplines, resisting the notion that an artist must specialize. In her own words: she’s too restless to devote herself to one medium only.
That restlessness, that constant mixing of medium and mood – creates a body of work that is never monotonous. Instead, it’s exploratory, alive, and always evolving. Prints from her portfolio are sold on platforms like Printler -letting her illustrations reach beyond the pages of children’s books, to homes, walls, and private moments around the world.
What Her Art Offers: Connection, Comfort, and Imagination
In a time saturated with digital perfection, polished social media aesthetics, and mass-produced media, Norlin’s art feels like a refuge. It offers quiet, gentle lines, warm colors, familiar forms, soft light – but also honesty: vulnerability, memory, grief, hope. It invites viewers: children and adults alike – to slow down, look closely, feel, remember.
For parents, her books may be bedtime rituals that teach kindness, empathy, acceptance. For anyone who’s lost someone, her paintings may be small memorials of love and longing. For dreamers, her mixed-media pieces may be portals into worlds where everyday objects carry meaning, where plants whisper stories, where soft colours remind us that beauty lives in nuance.
Her journey from a visual merchandiser to a working artist, designer and children’s-book author – is a testament to the power of persistence. From grief and illness to renewed creation, she proves that art can heal, evolve, and grow.
What’s Next – Stories Yet to Be Told
Currently, Norlin says she is finalizing several book projects and working on new illustration ideas. Her last known commission is a children’s book nearing completion, though personal challenges slowed the process.
She acknowledges the tension between familial responsibilities, health, and creative drive, but remains committed to art, saying giving up has never been an option.
Given her talent, authenticity, and growing public profile, it’s a safe bet that her upcoming works will continue to resonate with children, parents, art-lovers, and anyone who values gentle storytelling and visual honesty.
In a world that often measures success by speed, volume, and virality – Norlin reminds us that real art is slower, softer, more human. It’s about memory, it’s about healing, it’s about holding onto color even when the light’s gone dim.
Her studio may be small, but her vision is generous. And the stories she creates on paper, in books, in paint – have room enough for all of us.
