I’ve always been a doodler, but I only started taking it seriously in 7th grade science class when the teacher said “No drawing is allowed in class”. Naturally, I took that as a challenge and spent the rest of the year drawing. But doodles around notes on a page are one thing, and sitting down and doodling an actual drawing from scratch is something else. When you have notes on a page, there is something to work around and bounce lines off. It’s quite unlike that feeling of mild panic you sometimes get when faced with a blank sheet of white paper.
So it was quite nice to be prompted with an idea for these doodles in a lovely children’s art book I bought last summer, The Usborne Book of Art skills. I picked up the book with the idea of doing some watercolour sketches when I noticed the ‘doodle painting’ exercise instead. I used a calligraphy marker to draw the lines and coloured it with ordinary gel & metallic marker pens. The instructions say ‘draw a rectangle, then draw some curving lines to separate the rectangle into sections’, and that was enough to get going. I used some of the ideas they suggested for filling in the sections, but added the diamond shapes and stars myself. The paper was out of my paper stash – it’s a shiny white unlined notepad, reasonably heavy weight paper (the marker didn’t bleed through). No idea where it came from or how to replace it of course, so when it’s gone, it’s gone. Lovely to work on and the markers have been sitting on the shelf for years. Very satisfying to find a use for them.
