This tiny guy crossed the walking path on my evening walk.
At least I think it was a mole. It might have been a mouse. The lil guy looked confused about where it was going. It managed to cross the path (grassy fields on both sides) in kind of a zigzag and stop when hitting the grass.
I walked by carefully trying not to disturb and took this photo:
I made the drawing several days later trying to remember what the creature looked like.
I ended up googling some images of the front end of a mole and changing the placement of its paws a bit 😆
What do you think, was it a mouse or a mole? Does my drawing look like either, or both?
Some stuff involving food and animals happened in the house this week…
The heatwave + my pregnancy brain makes me do weird things and not remember I did them! But they apparently like to visit.
Neighbour Cat knows she doesn’t live in our house (I think). So she walked out the door willingly with a look that said “Oh hello Neighbour Humans, I was just stopping by. See you!”.
The frog, however, took a while to get to leave the basement. It escaped from my hands the first time I grabbed it, jumped onto the table and then hid under a closet. But in the end, I managed to get him into a bucket and ran out into the garden before he did another wild jump for freedom.
He didn’t seem to believe one bit that I was trying to help, that I would do my best not to squish him, and that living outside is much better for a frog.
I met this friendly, little cat on a walk recently and decided to draw/paint it with watercolour markers.
Cats everywhere
We definitely live in a cat town. I see new cats around the house and garden and on walks very often. And I only rarely see people with dogs.
I grew up with cats and later a dog, and I really miss having pets!
Since there will soon be a little monkey living in the house (who’s currently growing in my belly), we don’t plan to get any pets ourselves at the moment.
However, with the neighbourhood cats – not to mention the squirrels, frogs, birds and the hedgehog (I saw it again!) – it’s almost like having pets 🙂
New drawing materials
As you might have noticed, I’ve been drawing a lot of digital art this summer. But it’s also made me want to draw more traditional stuff and learn new techniques.
The cat drawing is based on a photo I snapped quickly, you cannot rely on the patience of a cat. A couple of days later I sat down and made a quick sketch and added some colour with my Winsor & Newton watercolour markers + water and a small brush. And finally I did the line art.
I haven’t used these markers in a long time and don’t know if I did it the “right” way. I also, for some reason, used this strange stonepaper that I had. It worked out fine, but I think I’ll try watercolour or mixed media paper next time.
Has anyone tried drawing on stonepaper – and if so – what drawing tools do you use on it?
Last week, I saw a hedgehog in my garden for the first time! It made me really happy, because I love seeing new animals in the garden. And hedgehogs are so cute! This guy was just walking casually down the garden path.
I also love hedgehogs because they eat slugs (I think?) and we have lots of slugs that like to eat my salad!
I know hedgehogs aren’t purple, but I chose a different colour than brown to give off a Danish summer evening vibe – and also just for fun.
Drawing process
Here’s a speed video of my drawing process:
The actual drawing process took about 30 minutes. As you can see in the video, I’m having fun experimenting with different layers, layer modes and textured pens in Gimp at the moment.
One of the artists that has inspired me to develop my digital drawings is JelArts – check out her channel on YouTube if you don’t already follow her.
A big, prickly mouse
I think I inadvertently made my hedgehog look like a fat mouse…
There’s something about the snout that I would change if I drew it again. It should probably be less pointy. And maybe the eye placement needs to be different.
But, hey! I only saw this particular hedgehog once, and only for about a minute. And it was the night time! 😀
I managed to take a very blurry photo, which I couldn’t really use as a drawing reference. But I decided to draw it anyway and not to Google how they actually look.
I did a hedgehog doodle for Inktober 2018 in more of my “old” lineart doodle style. They might actually look a bit more like real hedgehogs 😀
I’ve never really been great at drawing from a picture reference anyway, I prefer drawing freely from what I remember or imagine. And then mouse-hog creatures sometimes happen!
Mugs and things
If you like my recent more colourful drawing style, you might want to check out my new sourdough design in my Redbubble shop. That drawing was made mixing traditional and digital drawing – read about it in this post.
This cat drawing is another result of my recent Gimp adventures:
Naps are the best.
The drop shadow turned out a bit weird – don’t know what happened there. I’m still learning about drawing light and shadows after I’ve started to use more colours in my drawings.
I guess I could try to fix it, but I’m more motivated to leave it as is and try again with another drawing.
I haven’t had a lot of time to doodle these past couple of vacation weeks because of house visits and house work (and let’s be real – lots of preggo naps). When I’ve had 5 or 10 minutes to draw, I’ve mainly been doodling in my sketchbook, so will share some of those old fashioned paper drawings soon 🙂
I’m loving birds at the moment, apparently 😀 Maybe it’s a moving-into-a-house-with-a-garden thing. Today I made a redrawing in Gimp of a crow from the autumn of 2019. Here’s the result:
He seems to be quite content with his new look.
We actually have a gang of young crows in the garden at the moment who party early in the mornings!
There’s a flat roof above our bedroom, and in the beginning I thought a cat or other bigger animal was running around up there. But it turns out it was a bunch of crows jumping around eating cherries from our trees and laughing. There might not be any cherries left for us humans to eat later in summer.
But what the heck, I love having birds in the garden. How can you not – look at that cute, feathery face!
The old crow
The original version of the drawing was based on a crow I saw in the park when we lived in the city.
If you’ve been following for a while, you might remember that I made a 1-minute video of the drawing process:
I also drew the original digitally using my Wacom tablet + Adobe Illustrator. I still use the same tablet btw. I have an Intuos Art which is one of the smaller, cheaper drawing tablets. I don’t know if they still make that model, but I’m really happy with it. It took maybe a year to get properly comfortable drawing with it, and I’m definitely still improving.
Redrawing drawings
I think I’ll do more redrawings during my summer staycation. It’s also something I’ve done a couple of times before in drawing videos – check them out here:
I can recommend redrawing an older drawing, if you – like me – sometimes struggle to think of something to draw, but have creative motivation and the time to practice a new technique. It’s really fun!
I wanted to start using more colours in my drawings – and took it out on this bird:
This took me about 5 hours to draw!
I used the free programme Gimp to try something other than Adobe Illustrator. Learning to use a new programme and work with colours at the same time is definitely a challenge. But so far I’m liking the programme a lot.
All weekend, I’ve been switching between enjoying the process and being furiously frustrated when the drawing doesn’t do what I want.
I’ve obviously made coloured illustrations before, but it’s mostly been based off of my line art. Meaning that the colours were added as an extra thing at the end and not really taken center stage in my creative process. If that makes sense.
I still like doodling
I’ll probably continue to make mostly line art doodles, maybe because I’m a very impatient person in my core. But I really enjoy looking at other artists’ colourful drawings and paintings, so I want to try to include coloured art whenever I’m motivated.
Also, I know I mostly spell colour the British way, even though I probably also use American English spelling at other times. I care about spelling at work, but on here it will probably continue to be all over the place, since I can’t really be bothered to choose 😀 Noone asked, but there it is.
I surprised myself by putting two new designs up on my shop this week! I didn’t really plan it, but I’m really happy with them. They’re both cute animals, but in very different drawing styles.
This lazy Sunday cat in a window sill I drew last Sunday while sitting in bed looking at the rain outside (my absolute favourite Sunday activity!).
I liked the drawing so much that I decided to make it available as a print and greeting card:
And I also think it deserved to be on a mug – especially great for slow Sundays 🙂
Lazy cat, plants and coffee = a perfect weekend.
Unfortunately I don’t have a cat – but there’s a very friendly neighbour cat who visits often to get tummy rubs. But he stays outside (mostly!).
Squirrel snacks
The second new design is based on an old doodle that I made years ago. Meet Banana Squirrel:
*munch munch
I have a new found love for squirrels, because we have one in our garden (because we live in a house now!!), and he stops by every morning and runs around looking for acorns from last season buried in the lawn.
Happy yellow designs
I think Banana Squirrel looks perfectly fine on his own, just chilling and eating a banana.
But the yellow background really makes for a happy design, don’t you agree?
And then if you multiply him it gets kind of ridiculous, but I had to do it 😀
So many Banana Squirrels. Possibly too many.
If you’re curious about my thoughts on turning doodles into product designs, you can check out this blog post from november 2019.
Have a great day and thanks for following my silly doodle escapades!
For Christmas 2019, I made a lot of small homemade gifts for my fam. I had so much fun and only got a tiny bit stressed trying to finish all of them in time 😆
Since I’m still trying to relax and get over my cold, I thought I’d draw some of the gifts I made and tell you how I made them. The holidays are over, but they’re not specifically Christmassy things, so maybe they can inspire someone to DIY something 🙂
Bears Vs Turtles
For my nephew I made a tic tac toe game, but it’s a bit unusual:
I got the idea to make a game when I found a pack of three extremely cute polar bear figurines in the craft store.
It took me a while (and some creative inspo from Pinterest) before I decided to make a small unique version of tic tac toe.
I then found the three small clay turtles in my local Fair Trade shop.
The last step was to paint the simple gold pattern with a porcelain pen on a blue tile.
wordsanddoodles 