Inspired in a way by this thread, I present to you my poll:
What do you doodle?
I doodle a lot - on the phone, in meetings, when thinking about a problem at work, etc. As I said in the referenced thread, the 3 main themes are my signature, arrows, and snippets of the conversation that I’m having when I doodle. When I was a kid, I used to doodle rows and rows of tiled arcs, the end result looking something like cobblestone. (Think flattened rainbows, with the rainbow in the next row connecting the two rainbows below it.) I also tend to practice the “3 dimensional box.”
I doodle geometric constructions and odd aircraft reminiscent of Vaughn Bode’s efforts. And I draw geological concepts for a living, so I doodle them as well. Oh, yeah, and the occasional pair of…, what? No! I didn’t say that.
I draw squares. Tons of them. Sometimes connected, sometimes floating alone. Sometimes I’ll toss in a triangle or two. Mostly isoceles.
I also make a web of connected tiny circles. Draw tiny circle. Make a straight line. Draw another tiny circle at the end of it. Keep drawing tiny circles connected by lines, and never let the lines cross. Most circles have lots of lines connecting them to lots of other circles… some of my notes from especially boring classes are completely covered in this stuff.
Lips and eyes and people’s profiles. All the time. To further illustrate (and to find an excuse to add more content to my meagre web page) here are some examples.
People are sometimes disconcerted to find these phantom lips, lips, lips and eyes, eyes, eyes floating around on scrap paper near telephones, or on the back of envelops, or in the margins of my study notebooks, but that’s how it’s been since high school. If I’m sitting somewhere for a while and my hands are idle, I draw. I can be listening intently (in fact, I think doodling helps me listen better) but I’ve just gotta doodle. It helps calm me down.
Another eye doodler here. Generally I draw eyes, lips, noses, and ears all over my paper. I also draw parrots for some reason (no clue why since I’ve never been a parrot fan). In addition, I’ll draw trees and vines climbing up around the margins of my notes or all around the outside.
The most embarassing doodle was when I tried to draw radishes during one very boring meeting. I looked at my paper only to find the rather cartoon like radishes drawn all over my notes looked more like penises! :eek: No wonder the people on either side of me were getting uncomfortable.
A very, very angry-looking cartoon guy. No idea where he came from – my doodles were once just absent-minded collections of lines and scribbles – I often wouldn’t even be looking at the paper I was doodling on.
I would do this in company meetings…just doodling away while someone was yammering on about something horribly uninteresting. After awhile, this angry chap just started showing up on the page. Appropriate thought bubbles followed soon after: “Yak yak yak, STFU already!!”, and the like.
I also draw triangles, and diamonds, cubes and parallelograms. I’m all about the geometric shapes. I also do mosiac patterns which I occasionally actually make.
I do my best doodling in 2nd Period for some reason, and I draw the best looking cartoon people…I have a very unique style once I was drawing the best picture of my life and the teacher came by and tried to take it and it ripped. :wally
I have two main doodles: one, I write words in big block letters and then go back and decorate the letters with stripes and polka dots and such–the challenge is to make them all different.
THe second began as a habit of doodleing flowers, which I still do. But it grew into this ritual:
Using one sheet of paper as a straight edge, draw a tic-tac-toe board.
Make the outsides of the four corners into indentical right triangles with hypotnueses the same length as the distance between the “bars” of the tic-tac-toe board.
Connect the peremiter. Now it is an octagon.
Check the octagon for symetry by drawing a line from the centerpoint of each side to the center of the opposite side. If you have done a careful job, all the lines meet dead center.
Draw a flower inside the octagon. The spot where your lines meet is the center of the flower, the spots where the lines originate are the tips of the petals, and the lines itself serve as guides to making all the petals the same width.
Erase the octagon.
Shade the flower.
I have notebooks filled with these flowers. They take just enough mental energy to create that just the right amount is left overto pay attention to the lecture.
I doodle my signature a lot. Otherwise I just write my name in block letters. Sometimes I draw 3D Squares as well. Very rarely, but on occasion, I’ll start doodling tornadoes. I’m obviously a terrible artist, and this is the extent of my drawing skills - boxes and tornadoes.
I don’t. I wish I did – there have certainly been enough meetings recently where ANYthing to occupy an idle brain cell would have been nice – but, um, I guess I never learned how to doodle.
Faces - sometimes human, usually not. (My ‘dragons’ are more common). Anthropomorphs. Jewels and crystals. Weapons. Squares. Random arcs. Cartoon people. Naughty, naughty pictures. ‘Name People’ (The way I print my name just happens to lend itself to elabouration and personification.)
And in non-imageness: Nonsensical mathematical formulae. I idly re-arrange the alphabet. I use a particular method, although the exact details change every time: I arrange the letters like so:
a b c f g j k n o r s v w z
d e h i l m p q t u x y
(Or)
a b c f g j k n o r s v w z
e d i h m l q p u t y x
Then I rotate the blocks, flip the blocks, reverse one line or the other, reverse the whole thing, or rotate or flip the whole thing, as the whim catches me at that point.
Hmm…also ‘doodle’ song lyrics (to whatever song is stuck in my head…not composing. I suck at poetry/lyrics), Japanese characters, and very occasionally words that are currently amusing me.
Lots ‘n’ lots of cartoon people. Their expressions usually echo my own at the time, but violence of one sort or another is pretty common. (Knives, guns, hammers etc…) I have a talent for cartoons, tis a pity its usually confined to the margins of meeting agendas.
That and an infinitely repeating fractal kind of curvy paisley pattern.
