Ever since I was a wee Abbie I’ve doodled stars.
Lately I’ve found myself doodling flowers a little bit. But the stars win out.
I wonder if there’s any psychological reason we doodle the things we doodle?
It isn’t doodling, per se, but I have a tendency to write out fictional statistics.
I doodle vines. I also ornament words where I’ve taken notes (with vines and swirlies). Sometimes I draw a shape and then compound it symmetrically. Lately, though, I’ve taken to more folding and tearing with my idle hands rather than doodling.
Oh yeah…I forgot about that one. I’ll occasionally doodle mind-bogglingly complex equations that have absolutely no meaning.
At least one co-worker who happened to glance at my notepad thinks I’m a closet super-genius plotting to take over the world (or at least our department).
I hardly ever doodle.
But when I do it’s usually drawing large curvey lines that snake around each other, and then filling in alternating closed loops with luminous marker or biro line shading*
Or perspective 3d boxes.
Perspective 3d houses.
Gibberish words (I like drawing capital B so I write words beginning with b, like boobs)
*And I am going to do that now. Thanks for the reminder.
I draw lots of elaborate 8-pointed star designs, or swirly spirals, or impossible cubes, or tiny stick figures climbing all over the writing on the page (I do this one a lot with church bulletins). When I was in school, I liked to illustrate my class notes with cartoon people and bad visual puns (my Digital Logic notes were full of “half adders”, coiled-up snakes sliced in half).
Thanks! (Somehow missed that last night.)
Hal Briston, for some not-quite-joined-up reason, your angry guy with thought bubbles reminded me of a recurring subject for doodles at an old job: Unflattering cartoons of a select few of my coworkers. All ass-crack and elbows.
Vines, swirly curvy lines. Also profiles. Sometimes a puffy tree, then grass around the base of the trunk. One time in night school I had drawn a whole page of puffy trees with grass. My kids saw them later and said, “Mom! Why were you drawing pictures of atom bombs! You must really hate that class.” Looked at objectively, they did look sort of like mushroom clouds. But really, they were just puffy trees. Honest.
“Homer, I can see your doodle.”
“Shut up, Flanders!”
I doodle a lot, so these are just some examples culled from the last ten or twelve pages of my binder.
My initials, ‘SP.’ Stylized usually.
Dragons’ heads.
Bullets traveling through things [basic 3d bricks, heads, whatever.]
Often-varying cartoon renditions of myself [asleep, while doodling first period]
Octopi wearing baseball caps.
So the verdict is that I’m your average self-absorbed teenaged guy. 
Which reminds me, citrus…
No rock band logo doodlers? I thought all guys doodled those things. When I was in high school, if a guy’s book cover didn’t have an AC/DC or Rush logo drawn on it, he just wasn’t cool.
I can’t imagine anyone doing that. In my school, the only guys who draw anything- logo, picture of a car, whatever- on their binders are certian annoying drama people. Girls draw stuff all the time, though.
Anyway, I like to draw hypercubes on my notes. Also squiggly lines, and faces.
Staff Meeting Notes are fairly typical of my doodling.
yosemite, trublmakr, and I should get together – I draw noses. Tons of noses. Mostly men’s noses, and mostly from profile, but I throw down a few women’s noses, eyes, and mouths for variety.
I also doodle Celtic knotwork borders and designs, feathers, birds, fish, insects, vegetables, and fruit.
For more than forty years now, I’ve been doodling a Mickey Mouse head. You’d think with that many years under my belt, I’d be able to draw his ears the same size, but I apparently suck at this task. Sometimes his ears get outlandishly large as I try to even them up.
I also fill in any space within a printed letter that is entirely enclosed, i.e., the spaces within an a, b, d, e, g, and so on.
Geometric shapes and flowers too.
I doodle the 3-D box too, both the opaque and “see-through” varieties. You can tell what classes I find really boring by looking at my notes for tell-tale cubes, puzzle pieces shapes, happy suns, tulips, and random squiggles. Only after looking at some of the pages linked in this thread have I realized how subpar my doodles are. Alas, I fear my happy suns may not be so happy after today. Curse whatever fate led me to open this thread!
Cartoon characters, such as Woddy Woodpecker, Hagar the Horrible etc…
I also do “dot” doodles. It’s basicly just jabbing the tip of the pen at paper until something recognizable appears…
I draw a three pronged root like set of lines, with one line going out from it in a loop. At the end of the loop I draw back, to one side, and loop around, crossing the original loop part way back, and then on back around to the angle where the original loop ended. It is very simple leaf on a stem.
The leaf is usually small, and root begins at some feature of the paper being doodled on. After the first leaf, I start another somewhere along the first stem, and loop the other way, forming another leaf. Then a third, coming off one of the others, and then a fourth. I usually keep them pretty small, but occasionally have to loop fairly large ones to get out to the periphery. Multiple forks end up travelling along whatever is printed on the page. There is no real rule to how many branches come from a single leaf, but more than three tend to look a bit contrived. The only real form is the size of the leaves, which has to stay very close to uniform. The shapes don’t have to be identical, though, because it just makes them look less flat when they are twisted a bit.
In a long meeting, I can fill half the front page of a handout.
I had a notebook in the Army that had front and back done in very tiny ones, so tightly that I couldn’t fit in even a single new one. (Lots of meetings, and only one notebook.)
Tris
I filled my notebook in basic training with dragons, cleverly arranged in the text so that you couldn’t see them from far away, since doodling was a hanging offense there.
I went through a period of time where I doodled Penrose tiles, and similar rhomboidal impossible square stuff. I actually came up with something similar on my own, when I discovered that they were already invented, I was a little bit crushed.
I’ve always doodled improved humans with wings, tentacles, gills, in various combinations, trying to find the perfect form. IMHO the one we inhabit now could be vastly improved upon.
Right now though I mostly doodle sweeping lines and curves that wrap around each other like a circulatory system without the flesh.
I’ve doodled extensively ever since I began taking notes.
I too think it actually helps me listen better.
I doodle cartoon faces (usually topical to the subject about which I am taking notes, e.g. Socrates for a philosophy class, mythological characters for Mythology, Cephalopods for Biology).
I also doodle stick figures hanging off of text, a strange smiley face wearing a hat, and a “Kilroy” figure with a big nose peering over a ledge.
I love doodling!
Daphne Black