The Delights of Doodling

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

I AM a professional doodler. Self-taught, of course. A true blue doodler is always self-taught.

Self-taught doodlers almost always start their training in the classroom and so, many teachers are quite unconciously the inspiration of the bulk of doodlers. The next time you start thinking morosely of Puan So-and-So as the most boring History teacher that ever lived, just reposition her as the Muse of Doodles.

The Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners defines doodle as (noun) "a pattern or picture you draw when you are bored or thinking about other things"  and (verb) "to draw patterns and pictures because you are bored or thinking of other things".

Truly inspired doodling requires you to be in quite specific states of mind: "Not-quite-comatosed" and "away-with-the-fairies" are conditions that produce some of the very best doodles. Every doodler specialises in different patterns and shapes. I favour squares, wavy lines and concentric circles. Many years of doodling have evolved my speciality patterns and shapes into recognisable forms so that I now also seem to be quite competent drawer of elephants, pigs, flowers, cars and houses.

But seriously, this time last year, BBC online reported that, based on memory tests carried out by researchers at Plymouth University, "doodling stopped people from daydreaming, which was a more taxing diversion, and so was good at helping people focus on mundane tasks" (tinyurl.com/bkz96s).

By the way, the poet John Keats doodled! His margins of his medical text books are filled with doodles of flowers. He passed his final exams with credit and became a qualified apothecary, but poetry was obviously his true calling and he eventually resigned from the medical profession and became a fulltime poet. So, doodling is not a naughty thing to do. In fact, there are now books that encourage doodling! I don't think they are strictly about doodling though. Doodling, I maintain, must be spontaneous and, to a degree, unconscious. A doodler allows his hand the freedom to create the shapes on the page -- his brain is disengaged, distracted and only a very little of it is taken up with controlling the pen.

Doodle books take the freedom out of doodling. They've just cleverly capitalised on the fact that doodling shows that we can all draw quite well ... when we're not not thinking about it. We can manage basic shapes, lines and curves. We know how to form the alphabet  and numbers (each letter is just a variation of a shape, each number a combination of lines and curves). The trick is to put all those shapes and lines and curves together to create ... animals, people, buildings ... stuff!

Doodle books assure us that we are all artists. All we need is to be shown how to use what we already know. We need these books. We need these books to doodle? No, not at all, and I do dread the day when a child tells me that he can't doodle because Mummy hasn't bought him the book yet.

I'd prefer if these books didn't use the word doodle in their titles. I prefer Quentin Blake's Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered. Unfortunately, it no longer seems to be in print. Instead you have Doodles: A Really Giant Coloring and Doodling Book (this series includes Squiggles and Scribbles) by Taro Gomi, Do You Doodle? by Nikalas Catlow, Doodles to Go: Oodles of Step-by-Step Doodles by Deborah Zemke, even his and her doodle books in the form of The Girls' Doodle Book and The Boys Doodle Book, and many, many more.I don't really see the point in having gender specific art books -- as if the ridiculous pink-or-blue-driven divisions aren't enough, not to mention toy stores splitting their collections by (so-called) gender preferences.

The Girls' Doodle Book is about unicorns, fairies, cupcakes and butterflies. It even has a extremely un-pc picture of Native Americans in feathered headgear, posed in front of a wigwam and saying "How?"

The Boys book has cowboys, knights, dinosaurs and monsters. Good lord, how sexist can you get.

Doodles to Go is pretty cool as it teaches you, step-by-step, how to draw (not doodle!) ... mostly animals, with  a few objects like a guitar and a truck thrown in, almost as an after thought. Thanks to this book I can now draw a hand that doesn't look like a claw!

For true doodling though, all you need is pen or pencil, a piece of paper (the margin of a printed page will also do) and an appropriate inspirer of doodling - a boring phone conversation, a longwinded relative, a repetitive teacher.

Happy Doodling!

Comments

[T *--^--* T]

I love this entry... cause I too, a self-taught doodler... and I want to believe that doodling is a constructive mind stimulant.

;-)