Doodling

This post is in praise of doodlin’! After all, it’s been my longest standing creative practice, scribbling upon the edges of my notebooks and journals from as far back as I can remember right up to today. Since starting this bog I’ve been doodling less, allowing other more time-consuming art projects to act as outlets for my creative urges. Last week I realized I really miss the playful and unconscious nature of doodles. So, today I’m basking in my own doodling history to help reignite the practice!

I think school boredom is what initially caused me to develop this habit, and with eight hours stuck in a classroom every blank page became an opportunity of escape through my pen. Here’s some doodles from one of my highschool notebooks:

Skip forward with me to right after I graduated college: I started going through all my class notebooks to get rid of whatever I didn’t want to cart about. I quickly realized that over the last four years I’d doodled in the margins of nearly every page of notes I’d taken. I had a mountain of papers all doodled upon wherever my handwriting left space. I cut these drawings out and put all the scraps of paper in a file folder. Today I spent way too long piecing just some of this collection together like a puzzle to give you a taste:

Shortly after this my doodles took a SUPER colorful turn. All the sudden I abandoned my trusty pens and became obsessed with drawing tons of chaotic scribbles in pencil and then going over these in colorful markers and erasing the remaining pencil to bring out the characters I saw within the random lines.

After this, my doodling took another unexpected turn when I started doodling mazes, which became more and more complex. Below are two of my most detailed mazes, which I doodled in pencil first and then went over in pen. While these are complex, I still felt like I was just doodling, as I had no predetermined picture when I drew. I was just drawing whatever lines came out and watching the picture emerge. And yes, these are real solvable mazes… assuming you can see the lines!

After the mazes, I returned to completely free-form and simple doodles, mostly in journals and smaller pages. In reflection, I can see the same patterns appear over and over again throughout all my years of doodling, almost a style if you will, but also new directions and creative surges. Here are just a few doodles done more recently. I don’t know why mermaids keep appearing in my current doodles, they just do! That’s doodling for you!

And this week I drew on the back cover of my new sketchbook (see my post from last week for the front), continuing my doodling tradition, following the creative urge wherever it takes me!

To end this ode to doodling, there’s no better person to sing its praises than Sarah Vaughan, who wisely tells us “If I ever have a doubt, what life is all about, I get my pencil out and then commence to doodlin'”: