Outside Inspiration: The Art of the Doodle
January 16, 2015
Inspirational Art
So yesterday I brought you a wire artist who got into carving rubber stamps. Did the carving idea pique your interest? I think the hardest part of carving a stamp is not going to be the carving itself but deciding on a pattern to carve. How do you come up with stamp design ideas? Well, besides copying someone else’s patterns or designs — which would negate the point of creating your own original stamps — you can find your own personal patterns by doing something you probably did a lot as a kid or as a bored teenager in class. You can doodle.
Doodling is not as pointless and aimless as it might seem. It is really a translation of what is going on in your subconscious or, or it’s an expression of your mind’s reaction to what you see and hear around you. If you are doodling without a preconceived idea of what you are drawing, especially while otherwise occupied (such as being on hold during a phone call or listening to a lecture), the doodling can create a very personal design and set of patterns pulled from subconscious thoughts.
A recent doodling-related development is the Zentangle which uses repeated patterns and lines to lend your doodling direction. The original Zentagle method includes a series of rules, such as drawing only in 3.5 inch squares, only drawing in pen so you can’t erase and only drawing abstract designs. So it’s not quite doodling, but it can result in similarly personal designs. A lot of people have expanded on the Zentangle idea, throwing many rules out the window and developing cool abstract art like the Zentangle doodle you see here, by illustrator Angel Van Dam. Her doodles are a bit more organized and purposeful than your standard notepad doodle but aren’t standard Zentangling either. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how you approach it –doodle loose and randomly, mark off the 3.5 inch square to Zentangle in, or use a contractor to draw concentric circles, as Angel did for this illustration, and fill it in as you like.
And why should you want to doodle? Because it can offer so much for your polymer play! Use doodles or Zentangles to create the patterns for your carved rubber stamps. Doodle with colored pencils, and use it as an image transfer onto clay. Use the patterns, imagery or colors to inspire or directly design a polymer piece from.
Doodling is also thought to help you problem-solve so, if you hit a creative block, stop and listen to some music, a book on tape or podcast, and then just doodle away! The solution to your creative work can then bubble to the surface, or you may find a whole new idea there in front of you. No matter what, it is no waste of time. The other thing about doodling that has been discovered through clinical studies is that it reduces stress and can make you more aware and mindful. So doodle for your well-being as well as for your art!
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
What We See in Lines
October 8, 2013
Inspirational Art
We’ve all doodled at some point. There’s something addictive about putting an inactive pen or pencil to paper and drawing random lines, allowing them to be aimless and formless until perhaps we see something in our doodles and from it create an actual image or design. I’m sure you’ve done that same kind of thing in clay, whether you equated it to doodling or not. The random, seemingly aimless lines we draw or carve or lay out with a snake of clay are suggestions of things that already exist out there in the world. Like looking for shapes in the clouds, our minds will see an object or creature or other symbol in the clay, if you give them a little time.
I think this may have something to do with the fact that you can find similar lines in nature for almost any line you randomly come up with. However, nature’s lines are rarely aimless. The winding path of a stream or river, the marks of receded waves in the sand, or the undulating profile of a mountain range on the horizon are all lines that don’t have consistency or focal points, but are still very purposeful—they are the result of change and action and define some feature of nature. Seeing this, I think we want to find purpose in lines that look random and decide what they might define. That would be why you would look at these earrings by Lina Brusnika and see in the layer of undulating lines a landscape, maybe hills or a beach at sunset. Lina looks to live in Kamchatka, a peninsula in the far east of Russia. Her posted photos on LiveJournal of beaches and sunsets make me think she had these views on her mind when she created these.
We as humans want to see our world in every line; so consider how your lines, especially the ones you think of as abstract, might be viewed. Usually what you think you see in it will be how at least some others will see it. So if your aimless lines look like vines, you might continue with the plant theme by adding leaf-like flicks of clay for accents. Or if they are rather straight and precise, a very graphic look might be developed from those. If you want to work with a particular set of colors, what do they represent to you? If they remind you of a tropical beach, then simple, soft lines representative of an open beach, the ripple of waves on the ocean, and/or the waving fronds of palm trees might work well and will likely be recognized by the viewer of the work, since the colors and lines are both associated with such a scene.
So doodle away with pen or clay and see where the lines take you.
So yesterday I brought you a wire artist who got into carving rubber stamps. Did the carving idea pique your interest? I think the hardest part of carving a stamp is not going to be the carving itself but deciding on a pattern to carve. How do you come up with stamp design ideas? Well, besides copying someone else’s patterns or designs — which would negate the point of creating your own original stamps — you can find your own personal patterns by doing something you probably did a lot as a kid or as a bored teenager in class. You can doodle.
Doodling is not as pointless and aimless as it might seem. It is really a translation of what is going on in your subconscious or, or it’s an expression of your mind’s reaction to what you see and hear around you. If you are doodling without a preconceived idea of what you are drawing, especially while otherwise occupied (such as being on hold during a phone call or listening to a lecture), the doodling can create a very personal design and set of patterns pulled from subconscious thoughts.
A recent doodling-related development is the Zentangle which uses repeated patterns and lines to lend your doodling direction. The original Zentagle method includes a series of rules, such as drawing only in 3.5 inch squares, only drawing in pen so you can’t erase and only drawing abstract designs. So it’s not quite doodling, but it can result in similarly personal designs. A lot of people have expanded on the Zentangle idea, throwing many rules out the window and developing cool abstract art like the Zentangle doodle you see here, by illustrator Angel Van Dam. Her doodles are a bit more organized and purposeful than your standard notepad doodle but aren’t standard Zentangling either. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how you approach it –doodle loose and randomly, mark off the 3.5 inch square to Zentangle in, or use a contractor to draw concentric circles, as Angel did for this illustration, and fill it in as you like.
And why should you want to doodle? Because it can offer so much for your polymer play! Use doodles or Zentangles to create the patterns for your carved rubber stamps. Doodle with colored pencils, and use it as an image transfer onto clay. Use the patterns, imagery or colors to inspire or directly design a polymer piece from.
Doodling is also thought to help you problem-solve so, if you hit a creative block, stop and listen to some music, a book on tape or podcast, and then just doodle away! The solution to your creative work can then bubble to the surface, or you may find a whole new idea there in front of you. No matter what, it is no waste of time. The other thing about doodling that has been discovered through clinical studies is that it reduces stress and can make you more aware and mindful. So doodle for your well-being as well as for your art!
If you like this blog, support The Polymer Arts projects with a subscription or an issue of The Polymer Arts magazine as well as supporting our advertising partners.
We’ve all doodled at some point. There’s something addictive about putting an inactive pen or pencil to paper and drawing random lines, allowing them to be aimless and formless until perhaps we see something in our doodles and from it create an actual image or design. I’m sure you’ve done that same kind of thing in clay, whether you equated it to doodling or not. The random, seemingly aimless lines we draw or carve or lay out with a snake of clay are suggestions of things that already exist out there in the world. Like looking for shapes in the clouds, our minds will see an object or creature or other symbol in the clay, if you give them a little time.
I think this may have something to do with the fact that you can find similar lines in nature for almost any line you randomly come up with. However, nature’s lines are rarely aimless. The winding path of a stream or river, the marks of receded waves in the sand, or the undulating profile of a mountain range on the horizon are all lines that don’t have consistency or focal points, but are still very purposeful—they are the result of change and action and define some feature of nature. Seeing this, I think we want to find purpose in lines that look random and decide what they might define. That would be why you would look at these earrings by Lina Brusnika and see in the layer of undulating lines a landscape, maybe hills or a beach at sunset. Lina looks to live in Kamchatka, a peninsula in the far east of Russia. Her posted photos on LiveJournal of beaches and sunsets make me think she had these views on her mind when she created these.
We as humans want to see our world in every line; so consider how your lines, especially the ones you think of as abstract, might be viewed. Usually what you think you see in it will be how at least some others will see it. So if your aimless lines look like vines, you might continue with the plant theme by adding leaf-like flicks of clay for accents. Or if they are rather straight and precise, a very graphic look might be developed from those. If you want to work with a particular set of colors, what do they represent to you? If they remind you of a tropical beach, then simple, soft lines representative of an open beach, the ripple of waves on the ocean, and/or the waving fronds of palm trees might work well and will likely be recognized by the viewer of the work, since the colors and lines are both associated with such a scene.
So doodle away with pen or clay and see where the lines take you.
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