About
Lines and Grace is About Your Story
There's something unique that we all have -- our Story.
Our story is so engraved in our souls that we always find ways to tell it.
Whether you're posting that selfie on social media, logging your travels in a notebook, planning in a planner, or journaling in your beloved bullet journals or hobonichi.
For me, I told my story by journaling. Ever since I was in high school I was an avid journaler, if you can call it that. Journaling was the way I examined my life, my choices, expressed my faith, and kept me sane.
I've written decades in my journals and each entry was a remarkable moment or an invaluable insight into my life that helped me learn from my mistakes and make the right decisions. Looking back, journaling really helped me through the dark moments and did loads for my mental health and wellbeing.
Where it all started
The problem was as digital media became more and more visual, I found less and less excitement to read through those invaluable life lessons I had noted. Not just the demand on my time, but the allure of other people's stories at my fingertips.
So I searched Pinterest and Instagram for inspiration and found the world of creative journaling in 2018. I most definitely enjoyed it and thought I'd found what I was looking for. But as life got in the way, I found less and less time to sit and draw and color... and my journaling suffered. In 2019 I contracted temporary carpal tunnel syndrome and it became awfully painful to lift a pen, much less draw and write a journal page.
That's when I realized how journaling with stickers and digital journaling helped my wellbeing and my mental health as I continued to journal on my phone and on my paper journal with the stickers I had made prior to the carpal tunnel syndrome.
What can an Engineer, an Artist, and a Storyteller do together?
As with all our stories, our stories have many chapters. My decade long chapter of being an engineer, gave way to a new chapter - "and they lived happily" and the "ever after". The artist in me and the storyteller had been waiting for a decade for this. But what can an engineer, an artist, and a storyteller do together?
The Idea
In engineering, we found solutions to other people's problems. So you can understand how the Engineer in me had a light bulb eureka moment.
Inspired by anime, manga, and creative journaling, and after months of drawing and designing by hand, the engineer, the artist, and the storyteller in me have culminated in the products you'll find in Lines and Grace.
Whether you draw or not, whether you like to journal on paper journals or digital journals, whether you have a lot of time and especially when you don't, I hope with my products you will be empowered to create a journal that tells the story only you can tell-- your story.
And by journaling your story, you will find yourself in a better place mental health wise as it did to me. And that you will see how invaluable you are and the life you live and how you live it.