illustration

I did a bit of inktober

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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

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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

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

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

Comfy pants and cuddles

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These past months have been overwhelming, to say the least. I hope more people have come to the realisation that we all want and deserve a life with lots of hugs and comfy clothes.

And that it means we still need to fight politically for every human’s right to safety and happiness ❤

I haven’t really been able to focus on drawing or writing anything great, but I didn’t want to stay silent. So here’s one of my usual silly doodles, I hope it can spread a bit of love and positivity.

#blacklivesmatter

#pridemonth

Comfy pants and cuddles

The hello dance

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Seeing people wave their arms and do air hugs instead of hugs makes me smile in this weird, sad time.

I hope this drawing will do the same for you!

I’ve seen people almost dance around like mating birds.

I haven’t really been motivated to draw a lot lately – except for this drawing I made for my friends/followers here in Denmark yesterday:

Big virtual hugs for you guys on this channel too!! I hope everyone is able to keep safe.

I think I need to draw more these days, at lease these two silly doodles made me feel a bit better in our home office/quarantine.

The hello dance

I made a thing #2 (sewing edition)

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Here’s a doodle of some more Christmas presents I made for my family from thrifted fabrics.

Did you see my polar bears vs. turtles game?

Thrifted fabric things

The first thing is a gift bag. I made it out of a green piece of fabric from the thrift shop. It might have been a napkin or something.

Sewing is fun!

The bonus of using used fabric is that it’s already hemmed! And hemming is like the least exciting bit about sewing, I think. Strongly in competition with measuring and cutting.

Ok yes I only really like going really fast on the sewing machine! Which is a small part of the process, but anyway!

For the gift bag I just sewed it into a simple bag and tied it with a red ribbon – for optimal Christmas vibes.

It’s a scrunchie

Turns out I had a harder time drawing a scrunchie than I did actually sewing it…

The doodle is a bit off, but IRL it’s a black/dark blue shiny fabric with tiny gold stars. Originally a shirt from the thrift shop.

All I had to do was to cut and sew it into a cylinder. *Hot tip: use a longer piece of fabric than you might think so the scrunchie can stretch out when you add the elastic. I might have made this mistake for my first try. I probably could have looked up a sewing tutorial before starting but I didn’t have the patience.

I put a piece of elastic band in the proper lenght in the fabric tube, sewed the hole and it was ready for my nieces incredibly thick and beautiful hair!

From scarf to cozy

The third thing in the drawing is a burgundy scarf that I machine-washed which made it into a thick felt. Not really om purpose, but it turned out great.

I cut and sewed it into two tea glass cozies for my mum. I looked for some inspo on Pinterest but I couldn’t really find anything, so I ended up with my own design. They have coloured felt balls as “buttons” and a tiny strap. I made this so it’s possible to adjust the size og the cozy later if it gets floppy and doesn’t sit snugly on the glass.

Sorry for the terrible tutorials, and thanks for reading all the way through 😀

Support my creative ramblings

If you haven’t checked out my Redbubble shop with mugs, tote bags and other stuff yet, check it out here:

My Redbubble shop

And if you don’t need cute doodle products but want to support me, you can buy me a coffee here:

Buy me a coffee

I made a thing #2 (sewing edition)

Thrifted #1

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I went thrift shopping for a bit today. Not for clothes though, but I often buy my clothes second-hand. And when I got home, I remembered that I recently started drawing a new “series” to use some more pages in my Inktober 2019 sketchbook:

Imagined people wearing colourful second-hand clothes

Preloved things ❤

I love finding quality products like wool sweaters or shirts from an unknown brand that I wouldn’t find in a store.

As I get older (31 who?), it means more and more to me to try to only buy sustainably. Which is very hard, and I fail again and again.

However, with clothes I find that it’s a win-win, really, since I love the hunt for something fun and unique in the thrift store and it’s a LOT better for the environment. Older clothes (which have made it to the store) are also often of a better quality than a lot of new stuff, I feel like.

Okay, you get it, I can’t recommend thrifting enough 😀 Especially for clothes, but I basically buy everything, kitchenware, pictureframes, furniture, you name it.

Stay tuned for more thrifty doodles.

Thrifted #1

Floor doodles

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A cozy November evening a couple of weeks ago, I had an urge to sit on the floor and draw some doodles. So I did. The result was a lot of drawings – and I finally got around to editing this video with three of them:

I like doodling without sketching out what I’m drawing first. It means I don’t really know what I’m making until it’s finished.

For instance, I didn’t really know what activities I was going to have the three November people do until in the middle of drawing them.

Doodle body positivity

Sometimes the result isn’t fantastic and the proportions of some of the bodies and faces I draw turn out weird. But that’s part of the fun, I think. At least that’s what I tell myself while I edit these videos and rewatch the stuff I don’t like over and over 😀

The speed of the video is at 400 %. So it was a lot more calming to draw in normal speed than what it looks like. I had lots of thinking breaks. But those would probably be a bit boring to watch. However, I did make this video a bit longer than the other recent ones I’ve uploaded. Let me know if this format is fun to watch, or if you fell asleep half-way through.

Want more drawing videos?

You can support my doodle making by checking out my merch:

My Redbubble shop

Or by getting me some doodle fuel:

Buy me a coffee

Let’s face it, I’ll be drawing anyway – but the videos take some effort to make – so your support really helps!

Hugs for everyone reading to the bottom, you’re great!

Floor doodles

New doodle products…

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… in time for the Holidays (maybe, I hope?!!) 🙂

I uploaded 3 new designs to my Redbubble shop last week – and forgot to tell anyone about it… So here they are:

Check them out here:

My Redbubble shop

I chose to put the designs on different products that I think fit the drawings best. I never make one design available on all of Redbubble’s products, but I take time to really think about what products make sense with each design.

The cat design is also available on different coloured backgrounds – like this red one:

I also thought the cats would look really cool on a water bottle or phone cover, so I also made those products available – check them out on Redbubble.

At first glance this message might look a bit shallow:

But when you look closer, it’s not so bad at all:

Sometimes people get mad at other people for using phones too much – and that might sometimes be true. But to me, the best thing about my phone is that it connects me with my family and friends daily – and with people I’ve never met IRL – like you guys.

Doodles and words and things

Adding text to my drawings is new to me. But I generally like art with a combination of words and doodles (is anyone surprised??).

I think adding a bit of text can make some doodles work better as product designs and give it an extra dimension, if you will. Like the one with the phone.

Let me know if you agree, or you’d prefer the drawings to stand alone in the future 🙂

Tag me if you buy something!

I love buying prints and products from other illustrators that I follow online or from smaller local shops. If you decide to buy any of my products to give to someone – or yourself – please tag me #wordsanddoodles – I’d love to see where my designs get a home!

Will I get my stuff before Christmas?

According to the Redbubble website, printing usually takes 1-3 business days. But the cool thing is that they only make the products after you order them. It means less waste, and I’m really happy about that aspect.

Read more about shipping and manufacturing on the Redbubble website. Where you can also check out many other very cool artists!

New doodle products…