October has become a month full of drawings, with people across the world joining the #inktober challenge, or a variation of it. This year, Marina invited me to tag along with her. Of course, I said yes, as I saw this as a good way to challenge each other, but also to have some accountability to get through the month.

The theme

I’m Portuguese and Marina is Argentinian, so as you can expect we talk a lot about our experiences living in Canada as non-native speakers, and one thing that stood out were all the english idioms that people use on a daily basis, that sometimes require us to do some digging to understand.
See what I did there? 😜

Marina even had listed out all the different idioms that she has found, so we took that as a starting point, picked one for each day of the month and started drawing.

And these are the results:

Marina’s illustrations on the left, mine on the right.

Day 1: Train of thought

Day 2: All that jazz

Day 3: Cool beans

Day 4: Low-hanging fruit

Day 5: That’s fishy

Day 6: Doing some digging

Day 7: The world is your oyster

Day 8: Fleshing things out

Day 9: Down the rabbit hole

Day 10: Let the cat out of the bag

Day 11: Rule of thumb

Day 12: Boils down to

Day 13: Don’t poke the bear

Day 14: I’ll pencil something in

Day 15: A piece of cake

Day 16: Sparked my curiosity

Day 17: On the fly

Day 18: Lipstick on a pig

Day 19: Nutty as a fruitcake

Day 20: A band-aid fix

Day 21: Play by ear

Day 22: Half-baked idea

Day 23: A handful

Day 24: Bounce ideas off

Day 25: Doing the heavy lifting

Day 26: Didn’t make the cut

Day 27: On that note

Day 28: No hard feelings

Day 29: Keeps me grounded

Day 30: Cherry-pick

As you can see, we tried to vary our approach as much as possible. and used the opportunity to explore new things.

For the last day we wanted to do something special, so we decided to join forces on the same illustration. We wanted to reflect the 31st of October, that happens to be Halloween, but also take the chance to make a commentary on the year of 2020.

Day 31: Ghost town

Conclusion

Since both of us have a full time job and not a bunch of time in our a hands, this was a challenge, in the true sense of the word. But I have to say that sharing my interpretation and finding out what Marina had made became something I looked forwards to everyday.

If you enjoyed our interpretations, want to see our process or just want to see more of our illustrations, consider following us on instagram.

Follow us:
Marina Verdu (@almar_illos)
Halfool (@halfool_draws)