doodle

I did a bit of inktober

vejrupjo, , , , , Leave a comment

I wanted to draw every day, but that turned out to be very unrealistic. So let’s focus on the positive, which is that I made some doodles, and probably had more drawing time than I would have had without the Inktober fun/stress 😀

I managed to draw some pizza and some people and stuff for this year’s Inktober. And I decided to only draw Inktober drawings in my sketchbook and with pens and markers (not digital drawings).

As I mention in the first post I chose to follow the Inktober prompt list by Agata Zlotko this year. I loved the list and it made it easy to think of something to draw. For other Inktober years I’ve literally spent all day trying to think of something to draw that would fit the prompt. Which made it even harder to get something down on paper.

Btw check out my Inktober drawings from last year via this tag: Inktober 2020 – and you’re very welcome to check out Inktober 2019 here and 2018 too, while you’re at it.

I don’t remember how it went, so I think I’ll have a look after writing this 😀

As you can see, I recently switched to captioning my posts on Instagram in both Danish and English, so if you follow me over there, just scroll down a bit to read in English 🙂 I also switched my handle to jo_illu which kind of works in both languages, I guess.

I love writing in English, but sometimes it feels a bit strange, since most of the people who follow me on Instagram are Danish speakers and people I know. I’ll continue to write in English here, though 😀

I had a lot of fun drawing these three doodles for October 5, 6 and 7 from reference, which is something I don’t do very often. So I think I need to do that more, it’s very good drawing practice to draw random objects.

I’ve always found mugs and cups are incredibly difficult to draw. And I think these drawings show that I’m struggling. But I had fun drawing the patterns 😀

Weirdly, I made two doodles on the 20th which ended up being the last day of Inktober for me. Welp! Hope you had fun with this catch-up post.

I did a bit of inktober

MSG on my mind

vejrupjo, , , , Leave a comment

Today I listened to a podcast about MSG. It’s is a very interesting food additive, and something I only knew very little about.

Doodle style drawing of the letters MSG inside the mouth of a person.
A silly doodle and a serious post.

The Food Programme (BBC Radio 4) is one of my favourite podcasts. While the baby was on her way to a nap in the garden, I listened to the first half of the episode “Pure umami: should we learn to love MSG?” from May 2021. And I was eager to hear the rest.

The thing that struck me the most was the points about racism and the stigma around MSG and Chinese food.

As I learned from the podcast, MSG is used in a wide variety of foods, such as chips (crisps). The science does not show that it’s unhealthy, even though many people think that it is. I’m one of the people who had an idea that “MSG is bad”, but I couldn’t tell you why I thought so. I also couldn’t tell you why I mostly related this to Chinese food without giving it a second thought.

Racism is a hard word for me to say or even type, but it’s something that I know I have to care more about than I have. Especially because it is so ingrained in things that I would never think of, because I’m so privileged that I don’t see it.

Besides an important wake-up call about racism, what I gained from the podcast is that I probably shouldn’t worry about MSG in restaurant food. I could even consider using it in my home cooking. A whole other issue addressed in the end of the episode is additives in processed foods. Long story short, things like MSG or sweeteners can make a product taste good even though it has very little nutrition. And that might be a bigger problem.

Did you know a lot about MSG already, or did you learn something reading this?

Please listen to the whole podcast episode if you’re interested, I probably didn’t do it justice!

Anyway, thanks for reading this, I know the post was more serious than my usual stuff. Maybe it’s because I’m a mother now, maybe it’s because of the state of the world. I can’t promise my next post won’t be about a fluffy bug that I saw, or something even more silly. But I’ll probably continue to write about things that are close to my heart, I hope you’re here for it.

❤

MSG on my mind

Inktober 2020 – getting started

vejrupjo, , , , , , , 2 Comments

I managed to draw something every day for this first week of October. Which is already a great success!

You can follow along on my Instagram, but I’ll try to do weekly roundups here on the blog as well. The thing is, I’m also very pregnant, which means we’re having a baby this month!

I might not be able to draw or post anything for a while after she pops out 🙂 So that naturally takes the pressure off the challenge, which is probably a good thing. I’m going to try to draw every day until baby time, though. So far it’s been fun.

Here are my first seven #inktober drawings, some more “inspired” than others 😛

I’ll be posting today’s drawing on my Instagram in a bit – the prompt for October 8th is “teeth” 🙂

Inktober 2020 – getting started

Baby kicks and grapes

vejrupjo, , , , Leave a comment

The baby likes to say hello when I’m reclined and relaxed with some snacks on the couch.

Ok, she doesn’t actually giggle in there, but I like to imagine her to.

It’s possible she’s kicking me to get me to stop eating so many (quite sour) grapes from the greenhouse. They are giving us heartburn, but I like them. And I also don’t mind the kicks, it’s good to know she’s active in there.

Baby kicks and grapes

Catnap experiment

vejrupjo, , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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 🙂

Catnap experiment

Swol sourdough is back!

vejrupjo, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

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.

The old drawing looked like this:

sourdough yeast rise #inktober doodle by wordsanddoodlesblog
Read my Inktober post from 2018 here

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:

My Redbubble shop

Drawing process

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.

Swol sourdough is back!

The year of the belly

vejrupjo, , , , , , Leave a comment

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 😀

comic about shoes and bellies by wordsanddoodlesblog image 1
comic about shoes and bellies by wordsanddoodlesblog image 2
comic about shoes and bellies by wordsanddoodlesblog image 3
comic about shoes and bellies by wordsanddoodlesblog image 4 - final

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…

The year of the belly

My happy sourdough

vejrupjo, , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

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

vejrupjo, , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

vejrupjo, , , , , , , 2 Comments

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