31 english idioms illustrated by 2 non-native speakers
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)
Thanks for reading! Since you made it this far, I’ll introduce myself.
My name is José Torre, I’m a designer and I write stuff here sometimes.
If you feel like talking, connecting or just want to see what I’m up to, I’m Halfool on Youtube and Instagram, and you can also follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
