Hello! June's not over and that's great news. It means we still have two more chances to discover artists from the Netherlands. After welcoming Max Grünfeld, today, it's Doeke's turn. So if you like bright colors, a unique artstyle and pancakes, you'll love him. Get to know our artist of the day a little bit better by reading this interview!

 

 

-What is your name, surname and nickname? Why did you choose this nickname?
-My name is Doeke van Nuil and my nickname is Studio Doeke. I choose Studio Doeke because I want to do more than just illustrating, I also make, for example, pencils cases. So the studio refers to doing a lot!

-How old are you?
-I'm 25.

-Where do you live?
-I live in Zwolle, the Netherlands. It's actually quite a small city, and in the future I would like to live somewhere else, but for now it's perfect. 

-What's your job?
-I'm an illustrator and I try to draw as much as I can. I also bake pancakes in a restaurant. 

 

-What's your journey?
-I studied illustration on ArtEZ Zwolle and did an Erasmus on Escola Massana, Barcelona, which was amazing. I learned so much! When I came back I developed my own way of working as it is today and now I'm working as an (almost) full-time illustrator. 

-What is your inspiration?
-Things that happen around me, like conversations, traveling, love, coffee and plants! A lot of my work is autobiographical in a way, I always try to put something of myself in it. 

-Do you read webcomics? If so, which ones?
-To be honest: I don't really read webcomics. Haha. As a child I loves Donald Duck! (I still love him!) I used to draw him all the time. 

 

 

-Tell us more about your website.
-My website is my portfolio, so I only put the finished illustrations on it. I think it's very important to have a website so people all over the world can see your work and can stay tuned. I also have a Facebook-page & tumblr, so people can like and follow me and see sketches, or process in my work. And I do give-a-ways! (So follow me now! www.facebook.com/studiodoeke www.tumblr.com/studiodoeke) I love making things, like pencil-cases or bags with my own patterns or prints. I want to make thinks people like and make them smile so a lot of my work is quite happy, although every now and then some 'darker' things will come through.

-How do you work?
-I begin sketching, and then I will draw the 'real' illustration, which I mostly paint in photoshop. I actually have a lot of different ways of working, so every time it's different. There's day I feel like painting something, and stamping, and there's days I just want to draw. 

-Why did you choose this FML story?
-This one was so bizarre, I had too choose it! 

 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ILLUSTRATED FML

 

Doeke's website: http://www.doekevannuil.com/

 

 

If you want to be the next published artist, send an email to alice [at] fmylife.com including a link to your website/blog/DeviantArt. But DON'T send your illustration right away! You need first to get in touch with me, and I'll tell you what you have to do!

Growing up with a sister can be a good thing. If you're a guy, it can teach you about girls and how to interact with them so you won't grow up to be a sexist idiot who's afraid of women and who can only refer to them with tired old stereotypes. If you're a girl, you can steal her clothes, make-up and boyfriends. See what we did there? Clever, huh? However, living with a sibling can be tiresome. Rivalry is a big problem, it can cause a lot of stress, breakage and complaints from neighbors. Parents have to step in, cops are called, Jerry Springer gets involved and then you and your sister are the laughing stock of the 7-11. But as the legendary Twisted Sister sang, we're not gonna take it. In this new video, we've examined some of the fraught relationships between sisters and their siblings. As you'll soon see, some weird stuff does go on, but it's all tongue-in-cheek. Because we all love our sisters, especially Sister Sledge, the Sisters Of Mercy and "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths.
Check out the video now, because we want you to, and if you don't, an angel will be forced to watch Sister Act 3: The Wrath of Khan.

Today, I had to call the cops to break up a fistfight at my mother's funeral. It turns out my two brothers care more about having a pissing match over their favorite football teams than they do honoring our mother's memory. FML

You can tell from reading this story that we get a lot sport-related aggravation on FML. People take it seriously. Painting your face like a Juggalo and shouting at a man chasing a ball is a serious business. It’s something you either get or don’t get, and I don’t get it. I can see the appeal of wanting to belong to a team to glean some sort of self-validation and purpose in life when you’ve got nothing besides a tin of beans and a vague sense of national pride that your parents instilled in you like some sort of benign tumor, but once sport starts appearing as top stories on the news, it makes me feel like something is wrong. Charlie Brooker said, “Sport belongs in a news bulletin about as much as a mummified cat's head belongs in a Caesar salad.” However, I’m crap at sport. I’m unfit. I can’t catch things. I have the lung capacity of a clam. So I’m probably just jealous of all those lycra-clad gods and goddesses. So I just sit back and watch the stories float in here at FML towers about sporting mishaps, such as these:

Today, life gave me lemons, delivering them straight to my nuts via my neighbor's tennis ball shooter. FML

Today, at a mixed-family game of rugby, my dad resorted to calling me a "goddamned accident" and eventually body-slamming me, just so I'd stop playing long enough for his team to score. FML

Whether during professional or amateur sports, most accidents are non-fatal. We’ve all seen chilling videos of those guys whose legs go off at funny angles. Just thinking about them makes my spine tingle. Or is that the massive caffeine-infused cola drink I had earlier? A diet cola drink of course, because I like to delude myself that I drinking something healthy to compensate for not doing any sports, or even taking the stairs for two floors when there’s a deathtrap horror-movie elevator. But sports can be hazardous if you think that people can die of embarrassment. There have been documented cases, but nobody wrote them down at the time.

Today, I finally scored a goal in a soccer game. Too bad it was in our own net. FML

Today, my tennis coach showed up to practice in an all white outfit. I exclaimed, "You're looking very white today!" He's African American. FML

As you know, most people take part in sports as spectators. That bit I could do. It involved minimum physical participation, unless you count yelling at the television with a beer and some processed food in your hand. But some spectators actually put on some clean-ish clothes, leave their homes and go to watch real-life sporting events take place before their very eyes. This can also be very tricky, especially if you’re not really good at using your hands, legs, and other body parts:

Today, I went to a baseball game. On the way in, I managed to trip and get stuck in the turnstile. It took five minutes of flailing and twisting around in front of hundreds of people before I managed to pull myself out. FML

Today, during a basketball game, I fell into metal chairs, which then decided to fold in, causing me to fall to the floor in a very dramatic and painful fall. When I stood up, so did everyone else and they were all clapping, including the other team. FML

And some things are just plain wrong. When weird people go out in public, get caught up in the excitement of a point being scored by someone on “their” team, they just do… something:

Today, I went to an amateur baseball game with some family and friends. When our team hit a home run, my grandpa took it upon himself to start screaming wildly, removing his prosthetic leg and waving it jubilantly in the air. FML

Many more sports stories are to be found in the annals of FML, you just have to use the squirrel-powered search engine to find them. The popularity of sports, whether football teams (real football, not that hand-egg thing that the Americans play) or individuals sports like tennis or listening to the world curling championship on the radio, will never wane. Meaning we’ll never run out of sports-related FMLs, where either face-painted spectators or people chasing odd-shaped balls get hurt. Bring ‘em on.

Ah, you're here! Last week, and the week before that, we welcomed two amazing artists from the Netherlands to fit with our "artists from the Netherlands" theme this month. Great, isn't it? Well, today we're still travelling around this amazing, though still relatively unknown country. Well, thanks to FML, you do know what the Dutch have to offer when it comes to illustrations and comics. And it's dope. 

-What is your name and surname? Do you have a nickname? 
-My full name is Max Devica Grünfeld. For clarity, I am female, don't be misguided by my first name - don't know what my parents where thinking (but I do love it). I haven't really chosen a nickname for myself, as an illustrator I work under Max Grünfeld. I've thought for a long time about a potential illustrator name, but it all felt a bit forced, so I decided to stay with what suits me. 

-How old are you?
-I'm 23 years old. Hooray! 

-Where do you live?
-For the moment I live in Hamburg. My boyfriend moved here from New York as getting a Visa in The Netherlands is near to impossible, so we decided to settle in Hamburg. It's an amazing Harbor city, though the winters are pretty though! Otherwise I'm from a city called Amersfoort, 20 min by train from Amsterdam.

-What's your job?
-I'm a full-time illustrator. It varies whether I make work for myself, an exhibition or for clients. I love to do all of them, and the variety keeps it interesting for me. It's important for me to find time to work on pieces of my own, to have the freedom to experiment and tell stories with them. Besides illustrating, I work one day a week in a little art shop here in Hamburg. Which is great, because it makes sure I get immersed in German culture a bit more and get to improve my German as well.

-What's your journey?
-Since I was little I knew I wanted to do something with drawing, though at the time I did not know there was such a thing as an Art Academy. At the age of fifteen I followed a year long course to build up my portfolio and prepare myself for the Art Academy. I applied to only one school, ArtEZ Institute for the Arts, because I really wanted to get into that particular school. At that time it had a really good reputation for its Illustration department. Happily I got in and started when I was seventeen. In my third year I did an Erasmus (student exchange program) in Barcelona, Spain. This was one of the best things I could have done, as well for myself as for my development in style and art. I got the chance to learn from the Spanish art and culture and got to feel more free to experiment and find out who I was as an artist. After graduating in 2011 I had the luck to get to know some great contacts that got me work and exhibitions. Even though every month is different - months of struggle and lots of work - and you never know what will happen next month; generally it's going in an upwards line and that feels great. So far I've had the pleasure to work or to collaborate on some pretty amazing projects (!) and exhibit in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Hamburg and multiple places in the Netherlands. Right now I'm working on multiple projects, and we'll see what the future brings!

-What are your inspirations?
-My inspiration comes from so many things; it can be some obscure unnoticeable detail in life or a conversation, or something grand that has passed by. Usually I get inspired by the way people are, the way we interact with each other and our social behavior in general. How ever cliché this might sound, life has a lot of inspiration to offer. I love to sit somewhere, with a coffee or a thee and just people-watch. Traveling and living in different places is directly linked with getting inspired, to be able to see different cultures, cities, animals and people, it all gives me a fresh outlook on life. Besides this, contrast also inspires me a lot. It can be anything from nature related to cities or other things. The contrast between things makes it interesting and creates a tension that is amazing to draw out.

-Do you read webcomics? If so, which ones?
-I prefer having something in my hands than reading of a screen. I do love comic-books. The last one that I've read was Habibi from Craig Thompson, which was amazing! 

 

 

-Tell us more about your website.
-I created my website in the first place because it was an obligatory must to graduate, second place because I knew I needed one to actually work as an illustrator. But since I didn't know the least bit about web-designing it was a bit of a struggle! Luckily though I found cargo-collective to run my website on, which is quite easy to handle. 

-How do you work?
-I think about what I want to communicate first, either in my head or I start scribbling it down with small example drawings and words that pop into my head. I always prefer working with my hands than with the computer, so I do as much as I can by hand (sometimes, that's everything). Before or after I start sketching the idea out loosely, I think of the basic materials I most likely want to use. Material choice and color choice influences the character of my work. Once the base is there I just start working on it, and adding materials or changing the drawing a bit on the go.

-Why did you choose this FML story?
-I was doubting between four stories, but in the end picked the one that sparked my imagination for some illustrating that wasn't literally the story. If you ever had braces, than you know the amazing feeling of stuff getting stuck in there. I wanted to portray the other side of the story, not the person with the braces but actually the stuff that gets stuck in there. 

 

 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ILLUSTRATED FML

 

Max's website: http://www.maxgrunfeld.com/

 

 

If you want to be the next published artist, send an email to alice [at] fmylife.com including a link to your website/blog/DeviantArt. But DON'T send your illustration right away! You need first to get in touch with me, and I'll tell you what you have to do!

Members of FML unite!

As a member of the fantastic FML club, one of the perks is having access to the personal messaging service. Everyone can guess what it is from the name; it’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s not like it’s got a built-in function that’s going to make you more appealing to the person that you find so funny in the comments section and that you’ve been trying to interact with. However - drumroll and Mambo Number 5 trumpets - with this thing you can actually write to them and exchange views. Ideas. And maybe body fluids, if it has to come to that. If you’ll pardon the sort-of pun.  Anyway, this system is there for people to talk to each other, and so we can avoid personal discussions in the comments section. Watching two people trying to hit on each other in the comments section can be quite excruciating, like two half-blind cats squabbling over a dead beetle. If they take it to the PM system, we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and get on with commenting on the actual FML instead of having to try to ignore them.

So start clicking and sending those messages!