In our February 2021 issue of Digest we caught up with award winning Graphic Designer, Illustrator and former speaker Rejane Dal Bello and here’s what she told us.

When the first lockdown happened in March 2020, for me as for everyone else, it came by surprise. Everybody got scared for the reasons we now know, and as a consequence my ongoing clients and projects stopped. It was not easy to live with this uncertainty, but I guess we all are dealing with it in the best way we can.

The one thing that I had at that time (which was something quite scary in my life before lockdown) was TIME. So I took it as a currency and pushed myself to start and finish the things that in normal everyday life can get sidelined, with so many deadlines and bills to pay.

One of these things was Sticker Art. I had started playing with these stickers a few years ago, and in the first lockdown I focused on creating a range of them and had a joyful time creating freely. It was around May, and one sunny Friday, I looked outside… in front of my flat is a closed street with a massive white wall – I couldn’t resist and decided to lay out my Sticker Art for all the people doing their 1-hour of exercise a day to have a look at: to give them a “new thing” besides going to the post office or doing their groceries, since all arts and culture venues had been closed for a long time. It was a blessed day… through the Sticker Art I actually met a lot of people (in masks, of course, and far away from each other) – who wanted to look closely at a wall full of colour, and most of the people tried to guess what the art was done with. I had neighbours coming by, or chatting out their windows, and people who I’d never have met before appreciating the break in their day.

It was a really special day, and a good reminder of what art can do in our lives – it is a need we cannot refrain from.

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