I’ve picked up a habit of enhancing my handwriting as a form of doodling. I’ll go back to whatever I’ve written and make sure all my loops are closed, all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted. I realized last year that my mother does this too, particularly when she is on the phone. I will also draw hearts and stars when I am on the phone with my sweetie. My favorite doodle is when I have to scatch a pen around on a piece of paper to get the ink to come out. I then go back later and make little pictures out of the mess.
I doodle cats–mostly their faces, but I also do various action poses. Once I was stuck in this horribly boring seminar, and I drew cats in amongst the words, using two OO’s next to each other as eyes, etc.
I also like to make sardonic illustrations of what people are saying. For instance, this woman kept referring to the discipline aspects of classroom management as “the discipline piece,” which sounded funny and annoying to me, so I drew a handgun and labeled it “The Discipline Piece.” Stuff like that.
Arrows. (Used to do spears, does that mean I’m mellowing out?) They’re usually the colonizing doodle on anything. Then if it’s a class or long meeting that doesn’t require my input, it goes on to interlocking puzzle pieces, filigrees, and lines of circles getting smaller.
That last represents an image that I’d like to paint, but will never be able to: a line of floating white stones hanging down an airy stairwell, with a snake climbing up them. Everything is shades of off-white or beige.
I don’t doodle, I snizzlesnatch. Hey, don’t look at me that way! I didn’t come up with it. My dad did.
Anyway, it’s usually just a box or triangle or curve that I just keep adding and adding to with other miscellaneous shapes until it’s huge or I have to turn the page. Best done in black pen. My dad and I used to draw them together by each drawing a little while and then passing on to the other person. We used scented markers back then though.
Sometimes 3-D boxes and geometric things. Sometimes spheres with nice shading effects. But mostly cartoony faces, along with the odd goofy alien reptile.
A few minor examples.. I’m sure if I dug around I could find better ones.
Back in high school I drew lots of intricate mazes, which ended up looking like brains or intestines or something.
Hmmm, I could swear I’ve dated the guy in the second picture - third from left, bottom row.
In high school I kept a notebook exclusively for doodling. I called it my “boredom book.” I still have several of these. It’s fun to go back and look at them. Some of the things I drew in them included all the heavy metal rock band logos and crude caricatures of the students I didn’t like. Sometimes I’d see how accurately I could draw a map of the United States by hand (I was pretty good at it). I’d write the usual angst-laden poetry and song lyrics that one could expect from a typical teen.
Nowadays I most do simpler doodles such as stars, overlapping, shaded squares and rectangles (more shading where there are more layers), and patterns of 3D cubes (think of the Q-Bert game board layout). I do more “word doodling” than anything else when I am in boring meetings, since at least then from a distant glance I look like I am writing something important. One time I tried to see how many words I could come up with that could be played as musical notes (using only the letters A-G). Such words include: DECADE, BAGGAGE, CABBAGE, BEAD, DEAF, etc. When I first learned about hexadecimal I took the words using letters A-F and calculated their decimal values.
I have not actually had the inclination to “doodle” since high school, but then and earlier I focused on two things; anything involving tiny “stick figures” - from gigantic battles to notes to my girlfriend - and blackout. By that I mean taking a pen and carefully spending hours of the day coloring in an entire piece of paper out of boredom.
I don’t draw well at all, so my doodling options are somewhat limited. I often doodle spiderwebs in the corners of pages–if a meeting goes on much too long, I sometimes doodle a skull or entire skeleton with spiderwebs on it. I’m kind of proud of my spiderwebs, though (since they’re the most realistic things I draw), so I don’t usually mess them up with my crude efforts to draw other things. I also do extremely simple cartoony profiles. Occasionally I turn the entire top of a page into a doodle of a fortress, usually with rain pouring down on it. Mainly, though, I doodle an optical-illusion stack of cubes, in which the orientation of the cubes seem to invert when you stare at them. Any of you who remember Q-bert will have an idea of what I’m talking about.
I think I’m adding this book to my list of purchases for this month… I’ll have to let you guys know just how crazy you may (or may not, but yeah, sure) be. 