I'm always doodling. Especially when I am listening intently to someone speaking. I have doodles that go all the way back to high school and beyond. Sometimes I doodle when I want to let my mind off the leash, and as it wanders through landscapes of colours and textures, the pen moves.
Usually a pen. Back in grade school wherever I went, I would always have a stack of newsprint and a ball point pen. Any spare moment out they would come and doodles would happen. Lines would begin light and sketchy, growing darker as I decided on a final path and committed a dark deep line on the surface of the paper that gave way in such a satisfying way.
Thinking back, that deep, dark line behind the pen felt a little like planting in my garden does now. Seating the line or plant deeply leaves it in a good place. Who knows, maybe those doodles when I was seven and eight have rooted and are bearing their fruit now on every sort of surface around me?
Some days the doodles are just a lifeless collection of lines. Those sit a while and then get tossed. The lively ones, the doodles that seem to breathe, have a life before and after I made them, they stick in the mind.
These days, the lively doodles are finding their way onto and into different forms of creation.
Curly toes have become a series of satin-lined baby slippers. Cheery monsters have morphed into huggable pillows in fuzzy fleeces and lively colours. Lanky critters have spawned a series of big-footed floppy bunnies made from hand-felted old wool sweaters - some were mine, some have been found in used clothing shops, and now they know I am interested, shamefaced friends have begun hauling out accidentally-felted sweaters in gorgeous colours, apologetically offering them to me, since they are too lovely to throw out...
I see all kinds new ways for these doodles to take on a life beyond the paper. I seem to wake with new ideas every day. Hours are filled with developing new ideas, making up doodles already destined for some purpose, and the house is filling up with work in progress, materials destined for a project, and finished work. In between, around and through all this, family life continues - albeit in a more colourful, doodle-filled way every day.
If you want to see work as it is happening and would like to put in a comment, do visit on my creative Facebook page: ThePlayfulEye. Work that is ready for sale is posted in my Etsy shop: www.ThePlayfulEye.etsy.com
And comments here, of course, are welcome as always.
I need more doodle time. Good for you to keep your creativity flowing!
ReplyDeleteHi, LH. Sometimes doodles just have to happen. Usually it's when I know I should be doing something else. One reason I distrust the word "productive". Can't say these doodles are productive, but without them, I think I would dry up like an unused fountain pen.
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