More aww-invoking than a YouTube video

Although cat clips are surely the most popular animal films on Youtube, I'm not a regular cat clip viewer. In fact, I much prefer guinea pig videos. However (and in spite of the cruel way my great aunt's cat bit me when I was an innocent five year old), I do love cats. If I was to take any pet, a cat would be my first choice.

That said, I have a few cool catful things to share. First one is a print, which I designed for a brand called
SUPERSWEET x moumi - clothing made by cats, for people. I've already had the honour to make a banner for their online store last year, but creating a print for a tote bag was something else! The SUPERSWEET team is such a nice one to work with, I'm so incredibly happy that there are such quirky indiepreneurs left in this corporate world! Go you! (What an overwhelming amount of exclamation marks in one paragraph!)

The second cat-thing of the week is a brilliant colouring book, which I spotted on the website of Doodlers Anonymous a few weeks ago. With the help of their global community of contributing doodlers, these anonymous pencil maniacs have published already three colouring books. However, I hadn't noticed that they had also made one dedicated to cats and cats only! "The Quintessential, Quirky Compendium of Cats" has been put together to support an animal rescue organization called APSCA. A good cause, cats, illustrations...what else could you ask for (except a few guinea pigs)?

The "Around the World" tote bags will sold at SUPERSWEET's pop-up store in Thailand and "The Quintessential, Quirky Compendium of Cats" is available for ordering here.

Every bat needs a robin

Following the same sidekick-superhero theme I had on Valentine's Day last year, I illustrated a non-mushy card for the day of love and friendship this year as well.

I shall stick to this annual tradition of superhero inspired Valentine's day illustrations until the day I run out of funny references...if that ever happens, I might start buying the mushy heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. Meanwhile: have a happy Valentine's Day all you friends, strangers, heroes and sidekicks!

Look mom, I illustrated a bible!

"The next time someone asks me what I do for living, I'm going to say I illustrate bibles and stuff," I told my boyfriend. And that's practically correct: I have illustrated a bible. Not a religious one, though, but a more lighthearted edition called De Blog Bijbel. Sharing tips and tricks about setting up your blog, building a strong reader base and dealing with ups and downs of blogging, De Blog Bijbel is every (Dutch speaking) girls' guide to starting a blog.

The book is written by Carlijn Bekker, a freelance journalist and blogger, whom I met at Meet The Blogger event in Amsterdam last October. I happened to sit at the same table during a coffee break, and after a little chit-chat we found out that she had written a feature about my book Dear Fashion Diary. Speaking of a small world! We exchanged business cards (oh how professional), and a month later met up again at a coffee table to talk about Carlijn's own book. She wanted to embellish it with quirky and fun illustrations with a tint of sassy humour, and I couldn't but say yes, yes and yes! Lucky me, I also got to do the the design of the inside pages. I love projects that let me work on the overall design instead of just parts of it, and I had so much fun setting up the style for the contents and adding my illustrations in it. Hashtag heart - that's what a blogger would say, right?

The book is published by B For Books and is available for ordering online.

What happens in 279 hours and 30 minutes

When working on a project, at some point you are likely to end up staring at your computer screen till 1 AM and penciling your days, nights and weekends away, either because of a deadline or just insane enthusiasm. On those moments, when everybody else is asleep and you just keep on going despite everything that your parents ever taught about sensible bedtimes, it's fun to toy with the idea of finishing the project and ponder how you will celebrate it. Maybe a dinner at your favourite restaurant? A weekend full of absolute nothingness? A movie night with friends? Skipping all the healthy options in the morning and going for a fresh croissant instead? Whenever I'm in a swamp of work with a deadline that temporarily kills my free time, thinking about all those nice things helps me ignore the fact that my eyes are hurting from all the drawing.

This week, I finished a big (massive!) project that I have been working on since autumn. It's a children's book, and although I won't be able to reveal too much before it's going to be published in May, I can tell you that it has been one of the most laborious but also one of the most fun projects I have ever worked on! It took 279 hours, 30 minutes and one sketchbook to complete. Me and the client, an incredibly sweet and passionate Australian author, exchanged 549 emails of which roughly 50% were spiced up with smileys and one included pictures of puppies. Her morning was my midnight and my daytime was her bedtime, but surprisingly enough we managed to communicate very smoothly. I sent her illustrations and she replied with feedback right before going to bed and the first thing in the morning. It has been great working for someone who is so dedicated to the project that a solitary freelancer like me feels like she actually has an invisible colleague right here...despite the fact that we are literally on the opposite sides of the world. (Isn't that strange...? Two people can complete an entire book by being connected through the Internet...oh the wonders of the World Wide Web!)

A sneak peek from my sketchbook

For the past few weeks, I have squeezed all my illustration juices into this project to get it finished on time. I spent many late nights working and fantasising about the moment when all the illustrations would be finished, thinking about how I would reward myself. Now the book is finished from my part, and it's time to put those fantasies into action. I shall celebrate with home-made hummus (eaten straight from the jar, because that's the way, aha aha, I like it) and tea with a friend!

Hello 2014!

It's 2014. Here are ten nice things about the year so far.

1. My hair got chopped up to my shoulders and I haven't missed those 25cm of it that were left on the hairdresser's floor. Not even once.

2. I have one illustration project 99,9% finished, another one 75 % done AND a new idea for the next project of my own! I'm really excited about it and think it's a pretty good one. That kind of ideas don't come every day, so it definitely deserves an extra hurray."Hurray!"

3. I have (almost) finished dealing with the nuisance of filing quarterly taxes.

4. Most of the time the weather is cold and rainy, but our radiator works and we have a hot water bottle, too. When he (yes, he) is full, he looks like a chubby old man. We call him Bob.

5. I have one unread issue of Frankie and at least five unwatched episodes of The Mindy Project. (Update: one unwatched episode of The Mindy Project left - just finished watching the other four.)

6. I got introduced to a new dish, when a friend cooked it for New Year's Eve. It is really tasty, cheap and easy to make. Next to that, it is also vegetarian, so all you fellow starving artists and friends of animals: Mercimek Köftesi is the dish of the year!

7. I have three new friends keeping me company whilst working; a trio of small, pretty robins. They were drawn by a lady called Habiba, whom I met a few months ago. She is a harpist and a singer-songwriter, but obviously she is a great artist on paper, too!

8. Our small attic room has new curtains and I am very fond of them. Having my desk right in front of the window, the curtains are quite a prominent element in my daily field of vision, and that should be reason enough to appreciate their niceness.

9. The second edition of Dear Fashion Diary has arrived, and I have a few copies waiting to be picked up from the post office. Next to that, I have finally started filling a diary of my own, which has been really fun! Sneak peeks will follow later!

10. The list of movies me and my boyfriend have watched together since we "hooked up" (Do people still "hook up" these days or is it just something youngsters did back in the 50s..?) has reached the number 240. Last week, we started watching the Rocky hexalogy, and although no one will ever take the place of Indiana Jones in my heart, I must say I like Rocky, too.

+1. Weekend!

Happy holidays!

Talking about the lack of Christmas spirit, coming to "the snowy land called Finland" didn't help much, simply because this place isn't snowy at all. It's grey and rainy, which combined with the seasonal lack of daylight makes it feel like it's 6 o'clock in the evening 24 hours a day...

Oh well, Christmas came anyhow!

What you see below is a beaver bringing you last minute Christmas wishes. The beaver was amongst some sketches I made for a project, but unfortunately the client didn't like him much. Nonetheless, I loved him, so I drew and coloured him on my own time. Poor little rejected animal. Luckily he found his place on this Christmas card where he gets to enjoy his cup of tea in peace!

Merry Christmas to you and all the rejected animals and underdogs in the world!

Houston, we have a Christmas tree kind of a thing!

When Santa gives you lemons

Isn't it incredible, Christmas is just thirteen (13!) days away! I can't believe it - I haven't had too much time to get on a christmassy mood and feel like the D-Day is still a month away. One day, I tried to get in the mood and listened to some carols from the radio, but that lasted only until my boyfriend expressed his opinion about the cheerful children's falalas. Another night I burned candles, but only because it was storming outside, hailing inside (dear roof window, I'm afraid aren't doing your job too well) and I was haunted by the thought of a lightning slithering in through the electric cords. That didn't happen, nor did the christmassy mood.

Maybe the Christmas spirit will come when I go to the snowy land called Finland next week. Maybe it will come when I bake gingerbread cookies and decorate the Christmas tree. Maybe it will come when I'm trying find presents in the last minute despair with hundreds of other people, queuing in the shops and listening to Jingle effing Bells. Shame on me, I haven't got presents for anyone yet, so I hope my mind will blurt out some great DIY gift ideas in the coming days so that I can avoid those awful overcrowded stores. If not, I might end up baking the stone-hard cookies from last year and attach this illustration to the package as an upfront apology.

This illustration was inspired by an article I wrote for Oh Marie! magazine's winter issue. You can read it here: When Santa Gives You Lemons

PS. I've also started pinning some (ahem...two so far...) of my illustrations to Pinterest. You can find them here: Emmimarjukka - Things I drew

Buzz like a bee!

My freelance life has been quite chilled out lately: I have had a very reasonable amount of projects running simultaneously, and they all tend to have very reasonable deadlines, too. I have a timetable and usually dedicate one working day for one project at a time: on Mondays I do this, on Tuesdays I do that and so on. It helps me focus and get into a good work flow, when I don't have to think about everything at the same time. Sounds like a tip from some kind of a freelancer's guide..? It probably is.

However, this week I'm having an overflow of deadlines. I even scheduled some of them on following days, thanks to a not so smart brainwave that made me think my agenda was fairly empty. Turned out it wasn't, so here I am, working like a madman and multitasking my brains out, doing one thing in the morning, another one in the afternoon and something else in the evening. Like yesterday; I was in desperate need of some fresh air after sitting indoors from dawn to dusk, so I put on my sneakers and  rushed out for a jog. I ended up touring around the city for two hours, making mental notes for an article that I'm working on. Efficiency at its best - beats listening to your own breath and wondering how many meters you have left anytime!

I'm making it sound like I'm the busiest person on the planet Earth, so in all honesty I have to admit that some of the deadlines I'm talking about are self-originated. A friend of mine had a birthday, and I wanted to make a card - bing, a deadline! Me and my boyfriend celebrated two years of shared silliness, so I had to come up with something sweet for him - bing, a deadline! But I don't mind, because none of the deadlines - neither the personal nor the professional ones - involve doing something that I wouldn't enjoy. In fact, it is a great pleasure to be stressed out because of nice things!

With this positive mood and world embracing mindset, I shall leave you with this bee illustration I made for the cover of my agenda and proceed to the next thing on my to-do list: putting the mental notes from last night on paper (...or actually a word document...).

Farewell for now!

The devil is in the details

As part of the Secret Mission I'm on at the moment, I've been drawing plenty of kitchen and food related things: chairs, cups, cutlery, tables, teapots and celery. Some of them have been so called pieces of cakes that I've drawn, coloured and finished at once, whilst others have been drawn a dozen times before I have reached the point of perfection where neither me nor my client have found anything else to change or experiment with. 

Last week, I spent hours and hours drawing teapots: Japanese teapots, dainty teapots, metal teapots, teapots with smooth surface, teapots with texture and teapots with stripes. I also drew a jug of milk, but in the end it got ditched and put back in the creative fridge where it came from. Before that, I went through the same process with grapes, which didn't make it to the final illustration either.

That's the life of an illustrator: drawing tons of things on a sketch book thicker than a bible, whilst the end result of all that work might be just one illustration. At times, when I've spent 15 hours working hard and the outcome is just one illustration, I begin to wonder how did I manage to spend all that time working on one single image. At those times, it's good to remember that although it is just the hand-picked selection of top-notch drawings that end up being presented on the table, behind the door of the creative fridge there are dozens of sketches and tryouts that are not served - these grapes included.