Drawing, Doodling & Colouring: Fashion (Usborne Drawing, Doodling and Colouring) Ebay

While I remember that designers in general should be able to depict well enough to communicate their ideas, (Von Glitska @Vonster tweeted that those who can't describe end up plagiarizing those who tin), they should too doodle. Doodling is what you do when the rest of your senses are otherwise occupied.

I used to doodle during class lectures, meetings and sermons. I filled the white space in and around my notes with lines and shapes. And then I graduated to drawing in an around my notes. I found that doodling helped me to mentally process what the speaker was imparting.

Drawing does the same matter for me. I'll select a person nearby and draw them while I heed to the speaker. For example, I drew this contour of Tony Luna during his Art Center class, Crafting A Meaningful Career:

Doodling is aimless.

So, what is the deviation between doodling and drawing?

Doodling is described as bumming. A doodle has no real purpose but to keep a person occupied. It doesn't need to depict anything. There'southward no pressure to perform and create a meaningful, authentic drawing that communicates well. A doodle is simply a marker or serial of marks. They can be playful, geometric, linear, shaded… whatever.

Steven Heller wrote an article nigh doodling forThe Atlantic in which he points out that anyone can putter. It requires no talent, skill or special training.

Doodling is useful because it helps us process cognitively. It helps us to remember ideas and information.

Doodles are often the result of thinking, just they're not a depiction of thinking in the way a drawing is. Because doodles are aimless in nature, they don't need to communicate.

Doodling is to the [artist] what stream-of-consciousness is to the writer.

Doodling is calming. To appoint in mark-making quiets us down and we tin actually slow down. We tin can daydream and exercise our imaginations accompanied by the unforced rhythms of what I call visual wandering. Doodling is to the designer and illustrator what stream-of-consciousness is to the writer.

Drawing likewise quiets u.s.a., but we're not daydreaming. We're observing, studying, analyzing and moving, our brains and body aligned in a singular purpose. Nosotros go quiet because we're focused on one this and separating ourselves from distractions.

Doodles are not critiqued as drawing is. Neither are they coveted, every bit drawing is. I've never met anyone who was jealous that some other person could doodle better than she. In fact, we're all at most the same level when it comes to doodling.

We don't report others' doodles to get a ameliorate doodler. But nosotros exercise study others' drawings to build our own ability.

There are those who equate doodling to mind-mapping, I don't. I oft mind-map in my note-taking. Listen mapping is a blend of notation and drawing. It's a visual layout of information on a folio, a sort of diagram to help explain stuff. Listen-maps are sort of hand-drawn infographics.

Mindmapping involves more than focused thought and concentration than doodling.

Drawing takes aim

Drawing (the action), per basic Oxford English Dictionary definition, is the making of lines and marks. Well, that sounds similar doodling, right?

Just a cartoon (the affair) is defined as a picture or diagram made with marks and lines.

The verb, drawing, ways to produce a motion-picture show or diagram. Cartoon is a piece of work of visual art — the result of a productive (hence, the piece of work) process — whereas doodling is not.

And so while cartoon and doodling are both the consequence of mark-making, drawing takes it up several levels. Drawing is the evidence of focused thinking and attentive observation. Cartoon is meaningful. It communicates something, whether class, space, likeness, action, or ideas.

Draw accurately

When learning to draw, go for accuracy. Larn to draw form as it is. Depict what you see. (insert challenge hither).

Once you have the ability to draw accurately, then you tin draw expressively. Milton Glaser discusses this principle here.

Drawing makes us look carefully and empathise what nosotros're seeing. It helps our ability to see better — grade, infinite, gesture, move — and requite us a means of communicating what we come across.

Cartoon came before writing. Information technology's the foundation of the written discussion, whether we write with an alphabet or characters.

Depict expressively

This is where doodling can support drawing.

When I teach students to draw, I begin by having them simply make equally many marks as they tin on a blank sheet. My purpose is to have them go comfortable with making scribbles, hatching, and diverse types of lines and tones without the restrictions of depicting something. In this practice I'g asking them to simply doodle.

I've watched as many students tighten up and go timid in this elementary exercise. "Why do we need to practise this? I'm here to draw. Let'southward just draw something!" Then they first thinking about the lines they're making and become even more awkward nigh it. "I don't know what to draw!"

This exercise does not ask students to think in order to do. Information technology only asks them to practice, and kickoff getting used to creating lines and tones in full general. This is very different from writing. The signal of the exercise is to explore mark-making and split from the control of writing and moving the mitt only. In drawing, you need to move from the elbow, shoulder and wrist.

Doodling in this way can exist used equally a warm-upwards, loosening the torso to appoint in the cartoon to come. It'south similar those stretching exercise ballplayers go through correct earlier a game. Information technology'south a warm-upwardly session that serves the work to come. A ballplayer is not concerned most the mechanics of throwing during a game. The mechanics take go second nature. He or she merely aims the ball and throws the runner out at first.

When students go used to making marks without thinking about it, and become used to making a broad multifariousness of marks and scribbles, marking-making becomes automated and they don't need to be aware of how they create marks during their drawing session. That means they tin can focus on what those marks are communicating, which is a higher level of skill and understanding.

My doodling exercises likewise assist with drawing expressively, in which gesture and exaggerated contrasts come up into play to create emotion and action. It leads to overstating a straight-curve contrast, for example. And to coloring outside the lines, connecting the figure to the surrounding background.

Draw, don't putter.

If you hateful to draw — to say something, to record an incident, depict a likeness, illustrate a story, or decorate a surface — you need to exist intentional. Unless your drawing communicates, it's a mere putter. To be a drawing, your marking-making has to say something.

Don't be timid, aimless, unsure, uncaring, and uncertain. Drawing is intentional. If you lot mean to depict, don't putter.

More on drawing by Alvalyn Lundgren:

Add Energy To Your Drawing With Structural Syntax

Portrait Drawing Tutorial

Is Drawing a Necessary Design Skill?

Try my putter exercise:

On a blank canvas of paper or page, brand equally many different kinds of marks as yous tin using a pencil:

• Apply the indicate of your pencil.
• Utilize the side of your pencil.
• Use lightweight lines, medium-weight lines and heavyweight lines (your call as to definitions hither)
• Make long lines and short lines.
• Make thick lines, thin lines and lines that go from thick to thin.
• Make straight lines, jagged lines, curved lines.
• Make lines that look angry, calm, quick, slow.
• Enclose lines into shapes.

Once you fill the folio, get some other page and use marker to do the same.

Fill up a third page using a ballpoint.

And then, recap your feel. What impressed yous? What did you acquire? Did marking-making become easier as you lot kept going?

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