Hello, 2024!

Starting the New Year with a fresh introduction

It’s the first newsletter of the year, time to re-introduce myself with some random facts. Let me just scrape the ice off the windshield and we’ll be on our way…

Hello, everyone, and welcome to those who recently joined, it’s nice to have you share a slice of lemon tart with me! My name is Damjana and as a member of Illoguild, an international group of Children’s illustrators, I am writing this newsletter as my answer to this month’s Illoguild question “Who am I”.

Here are some random facts about me:

• I was born in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in the early 70s, when it was still a part of Yugoslavia. That makes me a teenager of the 80s and the same age as the kids from Stranger Things 😊.

With Piki, one of my favourite felines. He was a scruffy, rowdy tomcat who always got into fights but I loved him.

• I come from a family of journalists, teachers and artists but I’ve always loved animals and growing up I thought of becoming a vet. At least that was the excuse I used every time I tried to persuade my parents to adopt yet another stray kitten. By the end of high school my interests were all over the place and the orientation counsellor’s tests that were supposed to help us narrow down our preferences for future studies showed I was mostly leaning towards biology, foreign languages and art.

• My parents both spoke several foreign languages and thought the best way to learn them was to travel and converse with people, not study languages in an academic setting. Also, after working as a receptionist at the local veterinary clinic over two summers, I wasn’t that sure about becoming a vet, either. So was art my calling? I’ve always loved drawing, crafting and sewing, but was that enough?

• Well, I failed at getting into art school that first year after high school, I just didn’t draw well enough - so I joined my friend on a backpacking trip to UK. First we worked at a pets hotel in Hampshire, where we also lodged and took care of around 150 dogs and cats every day for a month. With the money we had earned we then travelled with our Inter rail passes across UK and Ireland for another month, staying in youth hostels and meeting people from all over the world.

On the Dublin - Holyhead ferry, September 1990. Probably one quarter of my backpack were cassette tapes for my walkman…

(I used my gap year to take some drawing and painting classes and a year later I tried art school again, this time enrolling into Textile and fashion design at the university of Ljubljana - you can read more about where that lead me here.)

• After I met my French husband and eventually moved to France, his job at an international company made us move quite a lot during our first years together; our son was born in South Africa and our daughter in Germany so none of us share the country of birth.

• … except for our dog Lisa and I - she is Slovene, like me, we picked her from a local shelter while we were visiting my family over one summer break. Since we live in France now, Lisa is also fluent in French - she can ignore commands in two languages.

• I used to sew handbags and purses and sold them on Etsy - the shop was called Loddelina and after ten plus years of using that name for my designs I decided to keep it in my new career as an illustrator and simply sign my name as Damjana Loddelina. My real Franco-Slovene last name is just too complicated to pronounce or spell.

• Oh, and I hate ironing. I would rather wash a mountain of dishes that iron a stack of dress shirts.

---

If you want to learn some random facts about my fellow illustrators, check the Illoguild Substack.

And don’t forget, tomorrow, Monday, 8th of January, Illoguild is hosting another free LIVE chat - this time we’ll be discussing our goals for the New Year and we’ll push this 2024 art boat out with a splash!

Click the link below for details - see you there!