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.

Fantastic Fashion

Better late than never, right? Here's an editorial piece I illustrated and wrote for Oh Marie! magazine's Circus issue back in September.

Read the full article on Oh Marie!

I'm very pleased with how the illustration turned out, considering all the blood, sweat and tears that I had to shed for it. I had plenty of time to work on it, but this time, that luxury didn't really work in my favour. I got started well on time, but there were a lot of things going on at the time, so instead of finishing at once, I made a draft and kept post-poning finishing the illustration. On the last day before my deadline (yes!), right after a night flight from Turkey to the Netherlands (YES!), I had planned to spend a few hours "adding the finishing touches" to the piece. That little session ended up being 8 hours of intense work, as I decided to not be satisfied with my first draft and basically started all over again. Yep. Sitting there, penciling away with a major sleep deprivation, I gave myself a big applause for the great planning. Although in all honesty, I have to admit that in a sadistic kind of way, I often enjoy these kind of creative struggles and crazily intense work. It gives me the kicks, when/if I end up with something that makes all the "suffering" worthwhile. I must have been some kind of an Opus Dei priest in my previous life. You know, like the one in Da Vinci Code.

Time has really been flying in the past few months. I'm already wearing my winter coat and boots instead of ballerina flats, although it feels like it was just a few weeks ago that I was skipping around in a dress and munching away with sandwiches in parks, my cheeks sticky with sunscreen. Dear sense of time, where did you go?

Oh Marie!

I love magazines, and although I do enjoy an occasional Elle next to my tea, independent magazines are the ones that I am crazy about. I love reading them, making them and - most of all - discovering new ones. Earlier this year, a lucky click on Twitter took me to the website of an online magazine called Oh Marie. Overjoyed by my finding, I got in touch with Marloes Snijder, the superhero behind this digital brilliance full of cute things spiced up with wittiness - that's the way, aha aha, I like it! We met up, drank two cups of tea and decided to collaborate. So, from now on I'm a happy member of the Oh Marie-team, working as sort of a blog manager, producing and planning content to keep the readers busy with nice things to read and do whilst waiting for new issues of the magazine to come.

What I like the most about working with indie publications - digital or printed - is that they are usually run by a handful of very dedicated people. This does not only mean that the passion and motivation that goes into making the magazines could break glasses if it could sing, but it also means that there is lots of room for flexibility when it comes to putting all your skills in use. A writer doesn't have to just write if she can also draw. Now, you must be wondering what the grandma's desk and Arne's egg chair business above has anything to do with my ramblings. Well, it's just about that: me writing AND illustrating for Oh Marie! This one is the first image in the series of illustrated quotes and one-liners from the magazine's articles that we will feature on the blog. It is a sneak peek to the upcoming issue, which is going to hit your digital bookshelves no later than tomorrow. You can read more about it here on Oh Marie's brand new blog.

I also wrote a short article called "Fantastic Fashion" for the upcoming issue with an illustration next to it. The illustration was one of those kind of fun, creative things that end up giving you grey hair in the middle of the night, but now it is time for tea, so I'll tell you more about that later!

PS. Just noticed having mentioned "tea" three times in this post, which reminds me of something important I should share in case there are some fellow tea-addicts behind the screen. Remember the beauty spots on teeth that I was talking about earlier? Well, thanks to a terrifying article that my mom sent to me, I now know where that seemingly harmless beauty spot came from. Hence, I no longer drink any other tea than fresh mint tea...and Turkish tea, but only when in Turkey. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, you know.

Friday the 13th and a delusional toast

Just wanted to celebrate the fact that I haven't yet slipped on banana peels on this Friday the 13th by sharing this funny little animation about a charming, delusional slice of toast. The only thing that I'm wondering now is why would a toast want to eat cookies? Wouldn't that be like eating your own blood....sorry, flour relatives?