Our Story
You’re not broken,
you’re becoming.
A studio born in the quiet between seasons
Artful Design LLC began on long walks along Cedar Mills Creek — in pinecones gathered, leaves pressed, and the slow work of rebuilding a life from pieces a woman once thought were ruined.
This is a creative studio for the ones who have lived through something. The ones still living through it. The ones who have learned that a heart, like a Japanese tea bowl, can be broken — and made more beautiful by what it took to put it back together.
Every piece we make — every necklace, every painted slate, every line burned into birchwood — carries that quiet conviction.
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Hi, I’m Celina.
I’m a Licensed Practical Nurse, a mother of three, a writer, and a Pacific Northwest naturalist. I founded Artful Design LLC in Portland, Oregon — a one-woman creative studio rooted in wabi sabi philosophy, daily nature walks, and a deep belief that healing belongs to every woman who reaches for it.
My work spans pyrography (woodburning), slate art, original paintings, and inspirational jewelry. Threads of my clinical background, my recovery from a high-control religious upbringing, and years of study in Internal Family Systems, Fierce Self-Compassion, and contemplative spirituality run quietly through every collection.
I wake each morning asking the same question: What treasures will I uncover today?
— CelinaSmall batch. Made on purpose.
Each collection is designed in-studio in Portland. Some pieces are made by hand here; others are produced in partnership with vetted U.S. makers under our specifications.
Pyrography Boxes
Hand-burned birchwood vessels for the keepsakes that carry your story.
Original Paintings & Prints
Pastels, acrylics, and botanical studies inspired by walks along Cedar Mills Creek.
Guard Your Heart
Celtic Heart Knot necklaces and slate desk plaques for women learning that boundaries are an act of love.
Art Prints & Journals
Affordable ways to carry a piece of the studio into your own quiet practice.
For women who are becoming
Artful Design serves women on healing journeys.
Women rebuilding after loss. Women emerging from high-control systems, addiction recovery, divorce, illness, or motherhood’s quiet upheavals. Women who understand that wholeness is not the absence of cracks — it is the gold poured into them.
If that’s you, you’re in the right place.
Wabi sabi — and why we chose it
Wabi sabi is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in what is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. The chipped tea bowl. The weathered fence. The autumn leaf about to fall.
It is the opposite of polish. It is the opposite of hiding what life has done to you. And it is the foundation of every piece we make — including the kintsugi-gold crack you’ll see threading through our brand.
For Nora
This studio also exists in the long, golden shadow of my mother — who ran her own small business until she passed in 2002. The entrepreneurial thread she pulled is the one I’m still pulling.
Every shipment that leaves this studio is, in some quiet way, a love letter to her.
Nora Jessie Richter 1946 — 2002From Portland, with care
Every design, every photograph, every word you read here is made in the Pacific Northwest — most of it on long morning walks with my Australian Shepherd, Everest, along the creek that runs behind our home.
It is a slow studio. An intentional studio. A studio that believes what it makes.
Come closer
If our work speaks to something in you, I’d love to hear from you.