The wonderfully inspiring Barbara Hepworth on her passion for making sculpture. You can get a lovely taster of her work in the excellent Tateshots series. Take a look here.

I waited all week to watch this short film via @Brainpicker and boy was I rewarded for my patience. Such humour, beauty and lust all set in one of the most romantic books stores in the world - Shakespeare & Co in Paris. Where, once upon a time, I sat in the sunlit window over looking the city while being read to by a man I loved.

Ahhh… animated amour.

This is a wonderful creative collaboration between designer Olympia Le-Tan and directors Spike Jonze and Simon Cahn. Incredibly they animated 3,000 hand cut pieces of felt to create this literary love story, with the delightful end result of two skeletons jumping each other’s bones.

Here’s Spike Jonze talking to Nowness about the glorious absurd quality of the film.

Do you go with your gut instinct?
If it cracks me up. We were talking about the skeleton coming off his book and the girl in the Dracula book waving at him. Olympia is someone who is just absurd, she’s used to just saying anything. She just started making the blowjob gesture as a joke to make us laugh but I was like, “We’ve got to do that.” It’s about taking things that could just be a joke while brainstorming and actually going for it and using it.

Finally I also adore the upbeat end credits soundtrack - Hump and Jump by French singer Soko.

Oh look what someone went and did. Here’s Ira Glass’ amazing words on the gap between your killer taste and your work in sleek graphic poster form.

That’s something good to bash your head against on the studio wall, in the early hours, when it all seems too difficult.

Kudos to young designer Sawyer Hollenshead for taking the time to make this.

You can watch Ira’s related interview here.

It’s one of the most reassuring expressions of creative frustration I’ve ever heard and I just keep going back and back and back to it as I try to narrow that gap.

“You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

I’ve been a fan of Georgia Russell’s beautifully delicate cut paper work for some time now. How wonderful to see her new work featured on designboom.

It’s fascinating to me, as a multidisciplinary designer, how artists can be so focused on one technique and find such depth and breadth in that medium.

Russell is constantly evolving her distinctive scalpel work into new realms.

How I would love a chance to see this new exhibition in Tokyo - Irving Penn and Issey Miyake: Visual Dialogue. One of my favourite photographers and one of my favourite designers worked together for 13 years. What’s more, the exhibition is designed by one of my favourite architects Shigeru Ban. Aesthetic heaven.

I dearly hope this will become a touring show, and make its way to London soon enough.

Amazingly Penn never went to a Miyake fashion show and Miyake never attended a photo shoot of his clothes by Penn. They both wanted the results to be a surprise every time. As designboom writes: “Their collaboration was based on complete creative trust.”

Together, but apart, they created iconic images of great beauty. I still treasure those first Penn/Miyake silhouette images I tore out of fashion magazines as a teenager and put on my wall.

“Things are the same with writing and knife making - it just takes buckets of blood and sweat and fucking work to get there, that’s it. To get good, to get competent. Then once you get competent maybe you have it in you to become an artist, maybe you don’t.

Before you get to a place where you can actually make art with the skills that you learn, you have to master the basics. It takes a lot of work to get there and when you get there, that’s day one. Then you can start and you can be making something that you maybe call art.”

Great words from artisan knifemaker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn - part of the Do One Thing Well movement. Above is Made By Hand’s beautiful film of Joel at work.

This photograph by @cobbing has made my day today. It is a breathtaking shot, as are many of his, but it wasn’t until he pointed out the hidden text beneath the image to me that it hit home just how special this photograph really is.

Go to Nick Cobbing’s site and click through the Surface Tension story until the end. When you arrive at the image shown above ‘The Town of Narsaq viewed through a hole in the iceberg in the bay’, click on the i for information below it.

Read the story. You will gasp. Just like I did.

Thx to @mssngpeces for sharing this @the99percent article today on Jonathan Fields new book - Uncertainty: Turning Fear & Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance.

Looks like it will press many of my fear, angst and uncertainty buttons. Ahhh we meet again, my old nemesis, self doubt. I know you will eat up my inner steely will up if I listen to your nagging whiney tones too closely… *places hands firmly over ears*

But thankfully:

It’s possible to effectively build “uncertainty scaffolding,” practices that allow you to do what you do (a) without ending up a psychotic mess, and (b) giving you access to an often untapped reservoir of creativity.

I wonder how sturdy my uncertainty scaffolding is? There are definitely days when I feel it swaying in the breeze, but it hasn’t toppled over quite yet. Perhaps as Jonathan Fields says I’ve trained myself into constructing it subconsciously.

For a far greater number of high-level creators, across all fields, the ability to be okay and even invite uncertainty in the name of creating bigger, better, cooler things is trained. Sometimes with great intention, other times without even realizing it.

Also, admittedly, I’m a sucker for the adrenaline kick that comes with not knowing what’s going to happen next.

Mickey Smith has an amazing poetic economy with words. So I am not going to say much about this, except please watch and listen.

Thanks to Mickey for blowing us all away with honest passion in the Do Lectures tent last week.

Interestingly, Mickey’s film sits beautifully alongside one by American surf photographer Chris Burkard that I posted recently.

Oh now really, how lovely is this Manual Photography Cheat Sheet from @Yatcher on Zazzle. I just wish I’d had it with me at The Do Lectures last week when I was playing with my new camera (Canon 600D for you geeks out there, no I couldn’t lift the 5D). As it turns out, through trial and error, I did just about ok without it.

At least Wired.co.uk thought so today when they used one of my pics to illustrate a beautifully crafted feature on the Do Lectures 2011 by the talented Ella Saltmarshe (@saltsea). It’s been a not so secret ambition of mine, for some time, to get my foot through the WIRED door.

I figured it’d be the words that would work their way in first. But hey, thanks to Ella, it turned out to be a photo of the wonderful Mickey Smith instead. As this young wise man likes to say, I’m armed with a smile.

Thanks to my gorgeous sis for this cheat sheet top tip.