drawing

Baby nap doodles

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I’m back! Ok so I’ve barely produced any doodles since producing a baby from my uterus. But today I decided to try to draw at least a BIT while the baby sleeps.

Nap doodles!

It’s an idea, let’s see if I can make it happen. Here’s a 10 minute doodle of some babies.

I don’t really know how to draw a good baby even though I look at one 90 % of my time 🤷🏼 I guess I’ll have to practice!

Post baby posting

I probably won’t write very much for each drawing. But it’ll be a success if I can draw some doodles, because I know it makes me happy. And I hope they also bring you a laugh or even some creative inspiration.

For a while after the baby came, I didn’t even think of drawing. I guess I didn’t have the energy or mind space.

Now she’s 3 months old and thriving and I really want to get back into drawing. It’s good for me to have down time that’s not screen-related – even though I still love my YouTube and Instagram scroll time.

Precious naps

I’ve realised that the challenge with having a hobby as a parent, or just getting anything done, really, is that nap time is so short and precious.

During baby’s naps I can eat or go to the bathroom. TBH I often take a nap myself. Or try to read the news, which is sad but obviously as important as ever. But really hard when your brain is occupied with poop, enough burps, milk, “is she cold/warm/bored/tired??!” and many baby smiles 🥰

Fun fact 👖👖👖

Today I put on jeans for the first time since before Christmas. I dont know what it is, but wearing them always makes me feel somewhat accomplished, even before really doing anything.

Maybe they were part of the reason I got a doodle made 😅 I only have one pair that fits my postpartum body, though, so I’ll probably stick to sweats most days still.

Thanks for reading all the way through! I definitely haven’t gotten less rambly now that I’m a mom, lol! But if you’re following this blog, you probably don’t mind the word vomit 😆

Baby nap doodles

Inktober 2020 – getting started

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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 butthead

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I made another comic about the baby teasing us from inside the belly 😀

It’s a quite messy sketch from my sketchbook that I made about 3 weeks ago.

Back then she still moved around a lot, but now I think she’s facing down (towards the exit!) Which is a good thing, because today there’s exactly one month to her due date.

At my last checkup the doctor wasn’t sure if she felt the baby’s head at the top of my belly – or if she “just has a very round butt”!

So she might be playing tricks on us!

I get a lot of wild kicks quite high up, though, but then again – they could be punches 😀

Last night, we went to a birthday party* and the baby had a dance party in my belly all the way home, so I almost couldn’t concentrate on my driving.

I’m not great at drawing babies, but I guess I’ll soon have a tiny model to look at and maybe improve a bit on the anatomy 😃

*Seeing people is “allowed”, because Covid seems to be under control in Denmark at the moment – but we all kept our social distance anyway. We’re not trying to be reckless! Just thought I needed to clarify. We’re in fact trying to be extra careful from now until baby time.

Baby butthead

Baby kicks and grapes

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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

This week’s things

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Some stuff involving food and animals happened in the house this week…

drawing peanutbutter and coffee sketchbook doodle
The heatwave + my pregnancy brain makes me do weird things and not remember I did them!
drawing cat and frog sketchbook doodle
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.

This week’s things

Flower sketches

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I thought I’d share these two different doodles. I made a traditional drawing in my sketchbook first, and a couple of days later it inspired a digital doodle of the same cute flower creatures.

Flower sketch made with marker and coloured pencil.
Flower doodle made in Gimp.

I like both doodles, but the digital definitely took longer to make. I tried out a drawing style that looks like it’s drawn with marker on paper.

Using my sketchbook as inspiration for digital drawings is nice. Then I don’t have to think of something to draw, but I can use my energy on trying new colouring techniques. 

When I made the previous post (Orange pepper), I realised that I didn’t have a garden tag on the blog. So now there is one!

Since moving into a house I have plants on my mind a lot of the time. I guess they’re a classic thing to draw, and I’m very bad at drawing leaves and trees and stuff like that. So I’ll probably post more practice doodles of indoor and outdoor green things on here 🙂

Flower sketches

Orange pepper

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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.

Orange pepper

Cat town

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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?

Cat town

Blurry hedgehog

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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.

My Redbubble shop

Thanks for the read!

Blurry hedgehog

Catnap experiment

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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