There’s power in doodling. It’s our escape, our daydreams made tangible. It’s how we coped with boring lectures in elementary school, and how we cope with interminable business meetings today. Even better, doodling defuses the pressure of “making art” and frees us to actually be creative:
Numerous historical figures have left behind doodles. Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscripts and John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!” In many other situations he commented that they helped with compositions. Stanislaw Ulam the mathematician is another example: he discovered the Ulam spiral while doodling during an academic conference.
Now, becoming a doodleist isn’t all fun and games. This is serious business and there are many highly formalized methodologies… and here they both are:
1) Do the simplest thing possible
You don’t have to go to art school or spend $2,000 on materials to make something worthwhile. You can start right now with an index card and a Sharpie. Anyway, it’s too early for the expensive stuff. You’ll be too worried about wasting it.
Take 90 seconds and draw something, anything, right now. Did that feel good? You’re on to something. Did it feel terrifying and wrong? You’re on to something.
Don’t compare yourself to famous artists; compare your work today with your work yesterday.
Use the materials at hand. Index cards, sharpies, pencils, rulers, copier paper, and scotch tape are just fine. Picasso got his start playing a child’s game of drawing animals with an unbroken line in dirt.
Hugh MacLeod said it best in How to be Creative:
The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.
2) Focus on output and quality will emerge
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
— Art and Fear, chapter 3
Recommended reading
- The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield: Drop everything and buy it.
- How to Be Creative by Hugh MacLeod: Drawing cartoons on business cards is the epitome of embracing constraints and “doing the simplest”.
- Getting Real by 37signals: Written by a software company, what they say about embracing constraints and rapid prototyping applies to any creative endeavor.
- Art and Fear – Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland: Lots more like the parable of the ceramics teacher in this.