Grantblings

Creative Mondays #023 – Doodle

Doodle.  Sketch.  Draw.  Even if you aren’t someone who can draw.  For the creative person there is benefit to spending some time letting your pen or pencil roam freely around a piece of paper.  Even if you practice a form of creative art that is not a visual medium such as writing.

First of all, just sitting and doodling can get your mind to wander for a bit and open your brain up to let some fresh ideas flow in.  Doing mindless tasks is great for sparking creative ideas and doodling is a great mindless activity.

Secondly, it’s good to get into the practice of doodling or sketch for you art.  There will be times in your career when you may have to sketch something out to get your creative vision across to someone else.  For example, I’m currently working on a puppet project and while the bulk of my work on this project is me writing out scripts, I had to draw a few sketches of my vision of the puppets to give to the puppet builder Russ Walko.  Now, I am no artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I was able to doodle my thoughts well enough that I could get the point across to Russ.  This is a good skill for all artists.

Finally, doodling is just plain fun.  I don’t have any statistics on this, but I’m sure, for many people, they doodled a lot more as kids than they do now in their adult lives.  So a return to doodling, a return to doing something a little more kid-like, a little more fun, jump starts our creative minds and that’s never a bad thing.

No need to worry that your doodles aren’t good enough to hang in an art museum or graces the pages of the Sunday comics section of the newspaper.  Just doodle.  Experiment.  You may stumble on a new creative act that will inspire your other work.  So spend a few minutes this week just doodling.

—

Do you doodle?  If so, has it helped your creative work in any way?  Let us know in the comments below!  Have a creative week!