Making a Creative Impact – My Words for 2025 and 2026
I like to choose a word for the year that guides my actions. In 2025, it was “Release”. This year, it’s “Impact”.
I think that Impact is a natural continuum of the word Release. Once you have learned to release a lot, it’s time to learn more about making a creative impact.
Have You Chosen Your Word?
Tips for choosing your word from last year’s blog post:
>> Choosing the Word for 2025
Discover your word through art journaling from 2019:
>> Guiding Word – Choosing and Visualizing Your Word of the Year
How Did My Word Work in 2025?
In 2025, I released a lot. It was not only because I wanted to, but also because I had to. The year was very challenging financially, and the world events have been depressing. It has meant bad things for the Finnish economy as well.
My art year could be divided into three sections: oil painting, watercolor painting, and drawing/art journaling.
Reflections on 2025: Exhibition + The Best Painting
In February 2025, I had a solo exhibition at the gallery Gumbostrand Konst & Form, where I presented not only my paintings, but also my virtual reality artwork, Unknown Land, which I completed the previous year.
Here’s a video about preparing for the exhibition.
Another highlight of the year was a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
In 2025, I painted five oil paintings and a couple of acrylic paintings. It is usually difficult to choose the best painting, because they are all unique, but I think I am most proud of this painting called Elixir. It has already been sold, because I had to, but I have looked at the image of it many times since then.
See how Elixir was made: Following the Inner Color
Watercolor Painting in 2025: Wild Garden
One of the biggest projects of 2025 was making the course Wild Garden. I made a lot of recordings for it, some of them from our garden. Before Wild Garden, I had made a course called Freely Grown, where you also paint flowers freely. But in Wild Garden, I wanted to go deeper and expand the subject. Wild Garden is a tribute to flower gardens, where we paint flower greeting cards and larger garden views.
>> Wild Garden – Flower cards and garden scenes in watercolor – Buy Now!
I love painting flowers freely with watercolors. I painted several flower watercolors in addition to the pieces for the Wild Garden course.
>> See how this painting was made: Let’s paint Like Emily Wrote
Happened in Drawing/Art Journaling: Fun & Mystical
In 2025, I pulled together everything I’ve done over the recent years in art journaling. In spring, I made a course called Hearts and Stories, where you make small drawings and use them as collages on the journal pages.
>> Hearts and Stories – Draw hearts and characters – Buy Now!
In summer, I went through my art supplies (Art Supplies I Should Not Use Anymore) and donated the supplies I no longer needed to a person who had just started an art hobby. In the fall, I went through all my art journals (Half-Empty Art Journals I Should Fill Up) and combined or discarded some. I also finished one of my art journals and made a video about it.
In December 2025, I released a course called Mystical Minis, where you draw abstract art with colored pencils. This course really captures the essence of the word Release. When I got the idea for the course, I decided to just follow my own lead – the words “Intuitive Power” – and let my creative engine run at full speed. I was in a flow state, and making the course felt exciting. I hope Mystical Minis is also an exciting and mind-opening experience for you, too!
>> Mystical Minis – Draw abstract art with colored pencils – Buy Now!
Word for 2026: Impact
I have been thinking about the impact the outside world has on me and how I can positively influence it. Even if creative ideas arise naturally and intuitively, I also want to think about what kind of impact they make.
For example, when finishing a freely-born painting, highlighting one detail above the others increases the impact. In the painting Cosmos, it was important to paint a small blue flower so that it connects the universe in the upper right corner and the beautifully rising vase.
>> See how this painting was made: About Music and Painting
In my work, whether it’s creating or teaching, I want to adjust small things to achieve even greater impact and connect many kinds of things in an impactful way.
The word Impact is not only directed outward, but also inward. We can ask whether all inspiration has to come from the outside. We are exposed to a large amount of information and external events anyway. So, could now be the time to give more space to inner inspiration that will have a more creative impact? I want you to start this kind of process with my course Mystical Minis, and in 2026, I aim to support you on this path.
I think that the biggest threat to art is that people give responsibility for their own thinking and entertainment to others. Then there are no paintings at home, only screens. Then moments become fragmented, and there is never enough time for yourself and your art.
Smilingly: Tell me, am I getting old? Or am I just too Finnish with these thoughts?
Anyway, I hope to remain relevant to you and make a positive creative impact on your art-making in 2026.
Building a Mystical Course with Hilma, Georgiana, and Virginia
Usually, after making a course, I think: never again! It takes time to get new ideas and energy. But this time, after finishing Wild Garden, I had a new idea right away, and it felt like someone was talking to me: “You must do this, Päivi. If you don’t, nobody else will.”
The upcoming course is called Mystical Minis. We will create abstract art with colored pencils.
We will make small drawings, and each takes only about an hour to create. At the same time, we see our inner world in a new light and build a self-feeding process for creating art. This course will bring both excitement and depth to your art-making. I believe it will leave a permanent mark on you, and I hope you carry the influence of it with you for a long time what ever art you make after the course.
Mystical Trio: Hilma, Georgiana, and Virginia
With Mystical Minis, I honor three women from about 100 years ago. Two of them are pioneers in abstract art: Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) and Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884). The third one is the modernist author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). You can’t find another course similar to this one, I promise!
Mystical Flow
I have been super-motivated to create the new course. So far, I have also enjoyed making it immensely. Some courses are born with intention, while others come out naturally, and those love children need to be born without too much forcing. It’s the very same thing as in the art-making! This course wants to come out, and I will help it.
I usually question the course idea many times before I start making the course. I especially think about whether anyone will buy it and what kind of people would. But here, it feels like Hilma, Georgiana, and Virginia do not care. They just want the course to be born. They want their voice to be combined with mine, and that brings an extraordinary meaning to this work that truly feels mystical.
If you have been in my courses, you know that I am not a secretive person. I always try to explain everything as openly as I can, and I can’t help smiling. And when I asked Hilma, Georgiana, and Virginia, why they picked me, they said: we need somebody like you to complement us, just be you and everything will go fine. And I have trusted them and followed my inner voice to gather all of us together, not only Hilma, Georgiana, and Virginia, but also you who want to create a new kind of connection to your inner world.
Mystical Minis – When?
I am currently editing the videos. I don’t have the exact publishing date yet, but I expect releasing this mystical course late this year or early next year.
Intuitive Art Journaling
Art is more than re-coloring what we already see. This week, I talk about intuitive art journaling and inspire you to follow your spirit and create more freely.
Even if we continuously grow our skills as artists, the joy of art-making disappears if we use too much reasoning. It’s good to practice the technical skills, but it’s also important to arrange time for the intuitive ideas to emerge.
Two Words – “Intuitive Power”
“Intuitive power” – these words suddenly came to mind when I looked at my colored pencils recently. I have been painting a lot, and it has made me miss my colored pencils, those powerful helpers! So, while working on the last pages of my Dylusions Creative Journal, I have been spending some quality time with them.
I started with a house, but then moved on to color more freely. I wanted to catch the atmosphere of that place rather than stay in the material level, drawing windows and such.
The longer I have been an artist, the more I have wanted to work with invisible things. More than tangible things, I want to express the spirit and the complexity of the world that can’t be photographed. I want to create images that are more like keys to many questions rather than direct answers to one.
Intuitive Artist
Even if I have embraced and used the word “intuitive” for over ten years, I have now realized that it’s not just one word of the many, it’s “the word” for me. And I don’t mean to narrow myself with the word, but to expand my thinking and creating in the direction that feels natural to me.
More than a building, I want to visualize the spirit of the place – the sensations that it causes in me.
More than a face, I want to visualize the spirit of the person.
Art Journaling Without Words
Rather than words, intuitive insights can come up as pictures. So, intuitive art journaling can be as simple as creating a series of drawings. The connection with a certain color can be enough to get started.
Color is a hole, and if you jump in, you enter the immaterial world. Colored pencils are the easiest tools for breaking the ice between the inner and outer.
“Intuitive power” – what do these words evoke in you?
Following the Inner Color
Here is my latest completed oil painting “Elixir.” I start my abstract paintings with the idea that I follow an inner color.
Color Chooses Color
The inner color is the color I feel drawn to, so I tend to pick and mix the first colors intuitively. And then, they wish for other colors to accompany them.
Colors also evoke shapes, and the shapes bring in more colors. A raw and bright color selection changes slowly to a more sophisticated one. In this color-driven technique, the inner color changes as the painting matures.
I try to give my painting enough time to find its own soul and paint several sessions, letting the paint dry between them.
First a Child, Then a Teenager
When the painting is only a child, I don’t care about the composition or what it will represent. I don’t want to force a short childhood or early adolescence. When puberty begins, it’s tempting to call the painting finished. But only then does she begin to find her own, unique mission and get prepared for a long life.
Teenagers often tell how they want to be called. When this painting was still unfinished, she was Ophelia because she saw herself as John Everett Millais’s painting from the 19th century.
I usually give the final name only when the painting is almost finished. Then I know what I want to emphasize with the name. Maybe we humans should get our final name a little later too?
Early Goodbye
I take pictures of my canvas paintings outside if possible, because that’s where the light is most natural. My husband often acts as my assistant and holds the painting against the wind. Most of the time, I end the photoshoot by saying to him, “Hey, come take a picture of us together!”
Since I sell all my paintings, this is the moment when I’m saying a mental goodbye to them. I assure them: “You’ll be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.” Even though I often miss my paintings, I don’t tell them. I feel like their mission is bigger than mine, and my job is to deliver all this for others, not for myself.
I have practiced most of my oil painting techniques in a quicker medium, so in watercolor!
Wild Garden – You Can Still Hop in!
In Wild Garden, we will paint freely, intuitively, and expressively in watercolor from Sept 22 to Nov 14. We will begin with floral greeting cards and gradually move forward in expression.
The course has just started but you can still hop in!
>> Sign up now!