Sunday Sketchbook is a collection of drawings made for fun.

In September 2022 I started drawing insects as an exercise to improve my pencil skills, but more than anything as a way to relax and clear my mind from daily work.

The idea was to make a drawing of a bug every Sunday and hang it somewhere on a social network to create a commitment with myself for over a year. After a few months, I started turning the paper doodles into digital variations with a little humorous twist. You can read more and see some images here.

The second year

After a year doodling bugs, I finished a year of silliness and took a week off, but the following week I started to collect folk stories from different countries to do one more year of doodles featuring a country each week.

There are so many good stories in the traditions of the countries that it was very difficult to choose something. I must emphasize that I’m not trying to make faithful representations but rather my own version with whatever info is available in the web. Under no circumstance these should be interpreted as mockery, but rather as my admiration for the folklore of the people of each region.

---

In addition to doodles of mythical creatures, I’ve added some other nerdy details to the illustrations, like an iso code (alpha-2) that corresponds to the country where the myth originates. The the block to the left in image below correspondes to a myth originated in Japan along with the numeric code for that country.

On the left you will see a block that corresponds to the publication week of my 52-week project, in this case Japan as 01.

It’s funny to me how when we ignore things, we instinctively just Google them, the results probably won’t be very accurate, especially in images right? but they reflect a bit of the biases of our digital civilization. This is what you get if you type “Japan icon identity”, at least if you are in New York:

So, I have included an element in each composition that corresponds to the first 5 results, in this case, accordingly to google, Japan with a tori.

If you want to see how all these elements play together in the illustration, here is a link to week 1 corresponding to Japan.

About the Author: