Marcel Winatschek

What Doodles Do to Your Defenses

Heng Swee Lim’s work—the Malaysian illustrator who goes by I Love Doodle, out of Kuala Lumpur—is the kind of illustration that hits you somewhere embarrassingly soft. Tiny planets with their own weather systems. Clouds that grow rainbow-colored pencils. Remote controls for adjusting your mood. The work is deliberately, unironically sweet, and I’m usually immune to that. Usually.

What keeps it from being cloying is the internal logic each piece runs on. These aren’t greeting-card aesthetics. They’re more like the furniture of a mind that finds the world genuinely worth decorating, and has spent time figuring out exactly how. I sat with the images longer than I expected to. That’s the test.