digitaldrawing

My happy sourdough

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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.

My happy sourdough

Another bird drawing

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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:

My small amateur YouTube channel 😀

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!

Another bird drawing

Trying to colour a bird

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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.

Trying to colour a bird