I take a pen and pad with me to any meeting I attend at work, and very often find myself doodling. Generally, it turns out to be intricate swirly geometric things that look like organic-Aztec circuit diagrams.
Initially, I was a little ashamed of doing this, when I should have been focusing on the meeting, but I found that actually, it helps me concentrate and in fact, I’m not missing any part of the meeting content.
Do you doodle? What do your doodles look like?
(in case ‘doodle’ means something else in other regions, I’m talking about idle, aimless drawing with pen on paper)
I tend to doodle cubes and pyramids, or make thick dark letters by drawing over them over and over. I would probably draw simple pictures if I could draw like someone older than two.
I doodle from time to time, specially in long meetings. Sometimes stick figures (one of my most memorable involved recreating a kung-fu fight sequence over about twenty frames), but more commonly just random swirly patterns, or awful attempts at trying to sketch objects that are on the table.
Do you keep any of your doodles? Mine go straight into recycling after the meeting, usually.
I’m a big time doodler, especially in meetings. Every note book I own will have some perfunctory notes from a meeting and then a few pages of doodles. I am single-handedly trying to educate co-workers to the notion that doodling indicates deeper concentration on what is being said. My mind would wander completely if I didn’t doodle.
I do a number of geometric shapes, the Aztec description seems fitting, along with tiny, very poorly drawn faces, or animals. I have saved a couple of them but most of them go out when I toss the notebook.
I used to try to hide my doodles, because a lot of people seem to think it’s like day dreaming. Now depending on who is in a meeting, I may be quite overt.
Not like I used to. I’m an artist, of sorts, and used to draw a lot of faces, eyes, noses, that kind of thing. I will occasionally do that if I have a pen and a blank piece of paper, but that is a rare enough event as it is, and when I do have one it’s for a specific reason and I tend to focus on the task at hand a lot more now than I would’ve in the past. I’m not sure what’s changed.
I’ve always doodled loads, from being art obsessed from a very young age. It used to be figures, but since becoming a graphic designer many moons ago, my doodles tend to be typefaces. Which makes me really boring.
I used to doodle all through high school and college but after that it was rare for me to have a pen and paper handy and be bored enough to do it. I thought I had lost the habit but a lengthy RPG session where our characters were often in different places and waiting in call queue for tech support the last year showed I still resort to doodling if the circumstances are right.
I draw armored men, both fantasy and scifi, demons and other monsters, spaceships, explosions and fireballs … used to think my drawings suck, but that was when I had a number of actual artists as close friends. Nowadays I’d say they are average, maybe. Not that it really matters with doodles.
Geometric figures, cross-hatching, random pen movements. If I don’t have a pen or pencil handy I’ll tear little bits of paper off of something and roll them into little balls. If I don’t have paper I’ll take a knife and start carving into my arm. Heh, not really, I won’t carve up my own arm, but if someone else is around I’ll carve up theirs.
Nope, not a doodler (sounds like a Gotham City villian - The Doodler!). I just went over the note pages I have used in meetings over the last year. One full legal pad and one thick spiral bound notebook. They probably represent 500+ meetings. Not a single doodle.
I don’t keep any on purpose - it takes me a month or so to use up a notebook, so they last about that long, then they go in the recycle bin.
Here’s one from a recent (long) meeting where there were no action points for me, and someone else was taking minutes - so the doodle consumed the whole page:
The corners of my paper tend to acquire spiderwebs, that being one of the few recognizable things I can draw. Sometimes I do Necker Cube constructions or very simple face profiles, but only if there’s nothing else for me to pay attention to.
I’m more likely to sketch… Not so much meaningless doodles, as illustrations in some detail. Cars, houses, people, etc. Really, it is doodling, I suppose, but with a kind of “completeness” that spiderwebs or squares or zig-zags may not have. The really good ones, I send to fanzines for use as filler art.
No, I never doodle. I’ve actually tried to doodle to entertain myself during really boring meetings and I just can’t get into it. It’s almost as boring as the call itself.
I’m another in the “doodling keeps me focused” camp. My doodles look a lot like what you see on the Zentangle website. I also do a lot of mandala-ish doodles.