I’ve always enjoyed drawing. Heck, I still have a drawing I did in the 2nd grade of Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, drawn from my imagination with a felt tip marker. (My Mom saved everything!).
Since then, over the course of many years I’ve spent periods of time drawing and periods of time not drawing, and the allied arts painting and not painting.
I recently decided that I wanted to learn more about doodling. How is doodling different than drawing?
For my definition, I see drawing as something more representational. More careful. Doodling is a quick visual shorthand. Sketching is something in between.
Like many pursuits, there is no shortage of information on line for learning to doodle. Like anything online, some tutorials are more like what I’m looking for. Some are not.
I found a website called iqdoodle that piqued my interest. Adam Sicinski is the creator. It seems that this site is trying to instill visual thinking into activities like note taking, or creative work in general, which is more of what I’m looking for right now. So, I started with their free 5 day course.
Their basic premise is that doodling is developed from a visual alphabet of only 12 shapes.
I thought that this system was pretty ingenious and later on I saw the exact same alphabet in this book, which I found at the library.
The visual alphabet shown above is apparently a joint creation of Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and Austin Kleon. Of course, other people have developed other visual alphabets, but for now let’s stay with this one.
An early exercise from IQDoodle has you use these 12 shapes to doodle random items you find around your house. Here are some examples from my sketchbook. Is this highbrow art? No. Just learning how to quickly identify shapes from everyday objects. And expand my ability to think visually.
