Illustratör - Linda Blåfors Carlsson

Who is Linda Blåfors Carlsson ?

Linda Blåfors Carlsson was born and raised in Blåfors, where it was almost always summer. In the greenhouse there were cucumbers, tomatoes and lots of other things. In the garage, her mother had a worm compost three stories high. There, Linda had to sort out the worms when a box of compost turned into soil. At OLIKA, Linda has illustrated the book Plants love poo!

“Illustrating Plants Love Poop! has been great fun! The earthworms got to show off their tattoos and one spread was completely filled with poo!”

Where do you find inspiration for the pictures?

The text is fun to read! Kristina Henkel is good at coming up with phrases like "Several friends in the same place", "Some seeds like to bathe" and my favorite "Plants love poo!". Since I grew up with large flower beds, vegetable gardens and greenhouses, it was a familiar environment to me. When I was little, my neighbor Brita had rabbits in her greenhouse one winter. When the winter was over, the rabbits had become very numerous. I thought a lot about those bunnies, but never drew them. I wanted to do that now.

Do you have a favorite picture?

Haha yeah! It is the flower in the yellow page that is included in the table of contents. This is my teacher Barbro from primary school. She had a huge garden that my class and I got to visit. There were exciting stone paths to walk on. It felt important to me that she should be there. Barbro also managed a large garden area adjacent to our school. There, all classes had help in cultivating, weeding, watering and harvesting. I also like the two earthworms that almost dance, it feels like they come from mom's worm compost.

What was the cleverest and most fun to illustrate?

It was about choosing what I didn't want to illustrate, I think it's so much fun to draw, but I know that the text in a book also has to fit. The spread with a lot of insects, gray sows, earthworms, springtails and shrews was a bit disgusting. There I had to look on the internet to see what they looked like and it was scary.

It was that I got so nostalgic. It felt like I was a child and living in Blåfors again. I got back a lot of memories from when I was little. What it was like sneaking into grandma's vegetable garden and Karin Holmlund's garden which was like another country and Eskil and Adela's raspberry rice where there might have been snakes.