Shu Habibi: Love+Hummus

For my first post on Steemit, I thought it only made sense to introduce myself by introducing my drawings.

About a year ago, I was living in Lebanon and met the love of my life. It's been an incredible journey so far, as we are both exceedingly dorky, cheesy, awkward people. A couple of months into the relationship, I would sometimes tease him with cutesy doodles in reference to little jokes with our relationship. It was pretty easy to make fun of us, because as he is Lebanese and I am American, there were often a lot of cultural differences or miscommunications that are always present in multicultural relationship.

My boyfriend surprisingly liked the comics a lot, so when I finally had to leave Lebanon to go back to the States, these cheesy little doodles and short comics would be the way I would cheer him up whenever he missed me.

We also loved to follow Catanacomics on Instagram, because we often found that her comics were a scarily accurate description about us as a couple as well. One day, after sending the fourth comic to my boyfriend, he asked me, "Why don't you do your own comics on Instagram as well? It can be like the Lebanese version of Catanacomics."

At first I hesitated, because these comics were pretty personal between us. Also because, drawing doodles and comics had always been such a private thing for me, one that I rarely shared. I mean sure, I had always entertained dreams of being an illustrator or creating my own graphic novel, but it was more of a silly daydream than anything serious. I figured, anyway, all I had was my cheesy jokes and prismacolor markers. No way I could hold a candle to some of the cool, digitally created artwork of some of my favorite Instagram comic artists.

But my boyfriend kept encouraging me, so I decided, "You know what, why not?"

And thus Shu Habibi ("What's up, Dear?") was born.

Considering I'm the type that often gets excited about projects and then drops them, I'm pretty proud that I've kept it going so far. However, there's definitely still a lot of room to grow. So I'd love to use this platform to share our cheesy Arabic love story, as well as to get feedback about how I can improve them. I hope you enjoy!