Day 44 of quarantine!
I said in my last blog entry that I would post some drawings that people requested of me. It's taken me a long time to do this, partially because I wasn't able to complete every single request yet, but here are six of the ones I have done! All of them were done in pen and ink.
This drawing is a portrait of my friend Maya. She was one of my closest friends on exchange and we continue to keep in touch. She was also the only one who asked for a portrait.
My friend Annika who used to work in the same office as me and who was one of the very few reasons I was sad to move out to New York picked prompt number 3, which was a special request. Her request was "you pick since you already drew a nice picture of me," so I drew a promotional image of her and her nonexistent catering business. She, the other girls in the office, and I used to joke about how we could do a whole wedding planning side gig given our collective talents. Since Annika is a big foodie, she would be the chef and caterer. (I'm pretty sure my thing had to do with handwritten invitations and live music.)
Jamie is one of my longest-running close friends. We've known each other since we were 9 because we were pen pals while I was still living in the Philippines. I thought it was cool having a friend from the Netherlands! We lost touch for some years after I moved to the USA, but she and I reconnected when I visited the Netherlands for the first time when we were 17. Since then we've kept up our letter writing and also chat using today's technology, of course! It made sense for her motivational poster to have to do with pen pals and reaching out to people far away. Also I tried to draw us as 9-year-olds which was an interesting exercise.
This motivational poster features my Bolivian friend/host brother figure Ignacio. I met him while on exchange in France, and French is one of the languages we use in conversation, so I figured the saying ought to be in French. Like I immediately knew with Jamie's, I knew immediately that our thing would have to do with jamming and also eating. Thus, the saying says, "When we eat well, we sing even better!" Bonus because he started a small business selling hummus called "Merci" (for no reason other than he speaks French? Idk why he called it that), which I drew here.
I couldn't figure out right away what I wanted to draw for my friend Isabelle, who is from Panama and who I met on my study abroad program in Rwanda. I knew I wanted to do one in Spanish, and for some reason I wanted it to rhyme, so I went on a rhyme generator and typed the word "cuarentena" (quarantine in Spanish). The only word that caught my eye was desordena, or "puts in disarray" in this context. This poster could be translated to say, "In quarantine, don't make things messy! Stay at home and clean it a little." It turned out really cute. Fun fact with this one - I messed up Isabelle's face really badly at first and didn't know what to do, so I ended up taking a whole other piece of paper, cutting a tiny piece out in the shape of her face, and redrawing the facial features. I then taped it onto the original drawing. When scanned the drawing, it looked like nothing had been done at all. I felt very proud of myself, and you should too.
No, I don't speak Swedish. Yes, all my friends are international and I don't have American friends. (Just kidding!) Aurora is a great friend of mine whom I met in a Rotary conference in Hannover back in 2016, and she's half Swedish half Mexican but lives in Sweden. I chatted with her to figure out what her motivational poster would be, since I didn't have any instant ideas. We agreed that the saying would be "Stay at home but don't forget to stay curious about the world," and the ocean would be in the scene somewhere since we both love the ocean. And voilà, this was the lovely result!
I'm pretty proud of these and should really get to doing the others at some point. Good thing there's more days of social isolation to go!
I said in my last blog entry that I would post some drawings that people requested of me. It's taken me a long time to do this, partially because I wasn't able to complete every single request yet, but here are six of the ones I have done! All of them were done in pen and ink.
This drawing is a portrait of my friend Maya. She was one of my closest friends on exchange and we continue to keep in touch. She was also the only one who asked for a portrait.
My friend Annika who used to work in the same office as me and who was one of the very few reasons I was sad to move out to New York picked prompt number 3, which was a special request. Her request was "you pick since you already drew a nice picture of me," so I drew a promotional image of her and her nonexistent catering business. She, the other girls in the office, and I used to joke about how we could do a whole wedding planning side gig given our collective talents. Since Annika is a big foodie, she would be the chef and caterer. (I'm pretty sure my thing had to do with handwritten invitations and live music.)
Jamie is one of my longest-running close friends. We've known each other since we were 9 because we were pen pals while I was still living in the Philippines. I thought it was cool having a friend from the Netherlands! We lost touch for some years after I moved to the USA, but she and I reconnected when I visited the Netherlands for the first time when we were 17. Since then we've kept up our letter writing and also chat using today's technology, of course! It made sense for her motivational poster to have to do with pen pals and reaching out to people far away. Also I tried to draw us as 9-year-olds which was an interesting exercise.
This motivational poster features my Bolivian friend/host brother figure Ignacio. I met him while on exchange in France, and French is one of the languages we use in conversation, so I figured the saying ought to be in French. Like I immediately knew with Jamie's, I knew immediately that our thing would have to do with jamming and also eating. Thus, the saying says, "When we eat well, we sing even better!" Bonus because he started a small business selling hummus called "Merci" (for no reason other than he speaks French? Idk why he called it that), which I drew here.
I couldn't figure out right away what I wanted to draw for my friend Isabelle, who is from Panama and who I met on my study abroad program in Rwanda. I knew I wanted to do one in Spanish, and for some reason I wanted it to rhyme, so I went on a rhyme generator and typed the word "cuarentena" (quarantine in Spanish). The only word that caught my eye was desordena, or "puts in disarray" in this context. This poster could be translated to say, "In quarantine, don't make things messy! Stay at home and clean it a little." It turned out really cute. Fun fact with this one - I messed up Isabelle's face really badly at first and didn't know what to do, so I ended up taking a whole other piece of paper, cutting a tiny piece out in the shape of her face, and redrawing the facial features. I then taped it onto the original drawing. When scanned the drawing, it looked like nothing had been done at all. I felt very proud of myself, and you should too.
No, I don't speak Swedish. Yes, all my friends are international and I don't have American friends. (Just kidding!) Aurora is a great friend of mine whom I met in a Rotary conference in Hannover back in 2016, and she's half Swedish half Mexican but lives in Sweden. I chatted with her to figure out what her motivational poster would be, since I didn't have any instant ideas. We agreed that the saying would be "Stay at home but don't forget to stay curious about the world," and the ocean would be in the scene somewhere since we both love the ocean. And voilà, this was the lovely result!
I'm pretty proud of these and should really get to doing the others at some point. Good thing there's more days of social isolation to go!
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