Featured Artist ‘Coco Lapine’

The popular brand Coco Lapine is known for its graphic prints. Sarah Van Peteghem is the Belgian designer behind the brand, which creates many nature-inspired, black and white prints. Coco Lapine is the featured artist, so now is the chance to get to know the brand and Sarah Van Peteghem better. 

What is great design for you?
A great design is timeless, but allows a certain group of people to see something extraordinary in a creation. Nowadays people are becoming more cautious about making a purchase, which is a great thing. We are thinking about a design, wether we love it or not and wether we believe we can love a piece for years to come.

Where do you find inspiration for your prints?
We are both very inspired by nature (both I and my boyfriend André are the designers of our prints) and we often find this to be the main inspiration for our prints. We like to try out new techniques as well, which can be the starting point of a collection. We find a lot of inspiration on our travels as well, the Iceland collection from last Fall being the perfect example of this.

In relation to the above, who do you get inspired by?
The work of Swedish artist Emma von Brömssen is very inspiring to me. I love the way she uses elements of nature as an inspiration for her watercolour patterns and even uses actual leafs and flowers to make collages for her art prints.

How and why did you start doing prints?
I have always been busy with drawing, painting and crafting ever since I was a child. In university I chose to specialise my graphic design skills into interface design. When I started working as a user experience designer after graduating, I felt the strong need to create art pieces and this led me back to being a graphic designer and artist.

The majority of Coco Lapine prints are black and white, is there any particular reason for that?
I like the look of black and white prints in an interior. They can be very strong and graphic, but at the same time fit into a lot of places without disrupting the color scheme that is going on.

What do you like about doing graphic prints?
I like the creative process from beginning to end actually. To see an idea come to life on a small sketch on paper, to making hundreds of variations to tweaking the print quality and paper, I love every part of it. I also love the fact that people really are buying your creation to hang in their homes and I love having a look on Instagram to see on which walls our creations end up.

What is your best advice on how to style Coco Lapine prints at home?
I think a combination of several prints in different sizes, framed in various ways with or without pass par-touts, combined with other wall hangings can create a very interesting art wall that gives a lot of character to a space.

How do you balance being an interior stylist and at the same time creating prints?
This is often difficult and a challenging balance to be able to spend as much time as I would like to on both projects. On the other hand I feel like it makes me both a better designer and a better stylist, since I look at an interior from both perspectives.

Shop all prints from Coco Lapine here →