… and then Winter returned 😳😄 But here they are anyway.
Here are 3 Spring-themed doodles I made in the first week of March. Still doodling away on my phone in ibisPaint X whenever I have the chance.
I love illustrating food, especially veggies 💚
I didn’t really plan out this drawing but just added things bit by bit. I try to eat what’s in season (and not grown in heated greenhouses), because it’s a way for me to be more sustainable. That means I haven’t had a fresh tomato or cucumber in a long time.
But living in this country can get a bit boring foodwise, especially in Winter. We love potatoes, carrots and all sorts of kale and cabbage in this house, but do get fed up with it. So we allow ourselves to get imported veg, especially peppers and lots of oranges and lemons, I just can’t live without them. And on rare occasions an avocado, yum!
I think I’m going to be a bit more loose about my “local and in season” food goal, because our daughter will soon start to eat solid food. And I want her to taste everything. But I’m torn, because I also want to teach her about sustainable lifestyle and give her a good Earth to live on!
When you think about it, it’s quite ridiculous that we have become used to being able to buy fresh fruit this far North in the middle of Winter.
Umm, that was quite a blurb about food. Anyway! Here are the other two Spring doodles.
Weeeeee! *sniffleJust a lil’ Spring flower who is maybe now reconsidering the choice to come up and say hi.
You can find speed videos of my drawing process for both of these last doodles on my Instagram.
It was great to have some days with nice weather, especially since all you can really do is go for walks at the moment. But then the cold came back to bite us all in the, well, cheeks! 🥶 So I think I’ll wait an extra couple months to remove my woolly layers 😄
I discovered Rachel Maksy on YouTube back in September when I was waiting for the baby to arrive. So me and my belly binged all her videos ☺️ And now I made some fanart, I guess!
If you’re at all interested in fashion, vintage clothes, cosplay, hair, makeup or just laughing, you need to check out Rachel Maksy (link to YouTube). Such a hilarious and beautiful lady boss, and so many memes! Of which I understand only a few, but that’s fine.
Yesterday I drew this portrait of Rachel on my phone:
I had fun with a more paint-like style than I normally go for and went ham with different brushes. It turned out fine, I think, but I’m still practicing how to draw properly in ibisPaintX (check out my previous post for more on that).
Makeup or hairstyles are completely out of my comfort zone, so I’m sorry if I messed up the details. Especially Rachel’s wonderful, messy, curly bangs were very difficult to draw!
I watched a bit of video while I sketched the outline but didn’t look a lot at reference images, so the portrait isn’t based on a specific Rachel look.
I put her in a blue shirt/dress because I liked the colour, even though I know she prefers brown, hobbitty colours 😊
You can check out a 1 minute video of the drawing process over on my Instagram.
Btw I’ve decided to try to draw and post something there every day for the month of March, so stay tuned for that. We’ll see if the baby allows it! Maybe I’ll do some roundups here on the blog as well if there’s time.
Gardening is new to me, and I get VERY excited when something new happens with my plants. Sometimes things change colour from one day to the next! So I had to make a drawing about it.
My sister gave me a pepper plant and a tomato plant as a housewarming gift in Spring, and they are both thriving in the greenhouse. There are soooo many fruits!
Colourful fruits
So far, all the peppers have been green, but a couple of days ago one of them turned orange! And it made me a very happy garden owner.
How do they know when to stop growing and start changing colour? It must be some kind of garden magic. Now the challenge is to leave it for a couple more days and see if it turns red. If I don’t eat it before it happens!
Drawing process
Here’s a look at my original hand-drawn sketch from my sketchbook:
I imported it into Gimp, coloured it in and added some layer effects to keep the hand-drawn vibe. I’m happy with the style, it turned out kind of children’s book-ish. Which I think fits the little story well. If you can even call it a story… To me, it’s headline news!
Also, I started work again last week after the summer vacation and today was the first very busy day. So colouring in this little doodle felt very calming and nice.
I’ve been doodling and drawing digitally a lot this summer, and I really want to keep it up as much as possible – even though I use up some of my creative energy at work. Drawing is so good for my mental health, so I need to try to stay in the habit.
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’ve been baking sooo much bread lately, and it reminded me of a dough doodle I made for #inktober 2018. If you love baking too, you can get the new, colourful Swol Sourdough as a sticker, on a mug or notebook (among other products) in my shop.
And here’s the fresh version of “Swol Sourdough” as I’ve decided to name it:
You’d better pop it in the oven soon, before it spills out of its tin.
I put this design on stickers, mugs and more products in my Redbubble shop for other baking nerds flexing their dough muscles – you can see them all here:
The new and improved version of my dough doodle was drawn on paper using Windsor & Newton Promarkers and coloured pencils. Afterwards I did some digital editing in Gimp and Adobe Illustrator to give it some clearer colours and contrast. I also ended up using Adobe Draw to do the final line art. Needless to say, I spent many hours on perfecting this sourdough!
If you follow the blog, you might also have seen this sourdough doodle that I made a couple of weeks ago – also inspired by the doodle from 2018.
It’s funny how old drawings sometimes pop up in my head and inspire something new. I draw a lot of new things on paper and screen at the moment, too, but redrawing old stuff is very fun and challenging at the same time.
I sat down today and sketched a couple of new comics. And then I realised I haven’t made any this year so far! As usual, this one is based on real life – in this case, a fresh conversation from yesterday morning 😀
It’s probably important to note here that I’m pregnant and soon in my third trimester. Which means my feet are beginning to be quite foreign to me and difficult to reach. We both joke a lot about my very round belly, but I also get all the love. I hope the last bit of the comic shows that 🙂
I have to admit, the perspective in the last panel is very strange. Maybe my BF is supposed to be sitting on a chair and leaning dramatically to the side or backwards? Anyway, it was fun to draw.
Mixing traditional and digital drawing techniques
After drawing and colouring this comic in by hand with markers and coloured pencils, I spent a couple of hours (maybe 4… Yay vacation time!) redrawing the line art and adding layers of colour in Gimp. My style has evolved quite a bit – Check out my collection of comics here.
I’m happy with the result, but I’m definitely still very slow when working in Gimp and need to practice loooots more. Luckily there are many little silly moments like the one above to use as material. And there will probably be even more when there’s a baby living with us!!
Fun fact about hands
I actually had my BF model his hand for the third panel. I find that hands are still one of the most difficult things to draw!
I was surprised at how well this one turned out. And let’s leave it at that small success and never talk about the squiggly doodle supposed to be my own two hands in the last panel…
Here’s a drawing of someone who’s been a bit neglected for the past couple of months…
Look how happy my sourdough starter is when it gets fed with some new yummy flour and water 😀
I haven’t been baking very much sourdough bread in 2020. But now that I’m on my summer vacation at home, I have more time and energy for baking – and drawing! Look at me posting on here three days in a row, woohoo!
I that noticed online that a lot of people kind of discovered sourdough during quarantine/self isolation. And it was very fun to follow and made me remember my own starter journey 😀
Sourdough starting
I started my starter in June or July of 2018. That summer was incredibly hot here in Denmark (and Europe in general), and I think that made the process get a bit out of hand. For about a week our apartment smelled quite… sour… To say the least!
Now that my starter is older, however, it’s a lot easier to bake with and maintain and it lives happily in our fridge, as long as I feed it once every 2 or 3 weeks.
For the baking nerds still reading
I don’t always manage to plan a couple of days ahead when I want to bake, though (dough, lol). Which means we also get a lot of non-sourdough bread and obviously store-bought bread, which is nice too. But I really love the final result, when I do bake my own. I’m also not a sourdough purist – I mostly add some yeast to my dough.
Drawing process
Today’s drawing was drawn digitally in Gimp with my Wacom tablet and without a hand drawn sketch as the basis (which I often use). I tried to keep the style a bit more simple than my two previous drawings while I’m still learning to use the programme, so I don’t burn out 🙂
I think this bread doodle from my Inktober 2018 was a bit of an inspiration for today’s drawing. If you’re a proper doodle/sourdough nerd, you can check out all my sourdough-related posts under this tag: sourdough.
Thanks for reading all the way through, please share your sourdough stories (good or bad) in the comments, if you feel like it.
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.
wordsanddoodles 