Automatic Doodling

The automatic nature of doodling has always attracted me in a similar way to collage, as I described in a previous post. For all of the same reasons it is a perfect way to move past the negative feedback loop that is created by the pressure I put on myself when I attempt to make everything that I create exceptional. So when I hit a block recently, I started doodling. The pattern that I use in these images is one that I have been using in doodles since I began developing it in my senior year of high school. At the time, I was heavily interested in graffiti, and a lot of the forms that are employed in the pattern are those that my hand had picked up from sketching letter forms. Similarly, the collaged/pasted/edited/subverted elements of these images comes from that artistic background. It shouldn't be too hard to see where graffiti roots would play a role in drawing on or covering other people's work.

Being a graphic designer, I do not focus on naturalistic representation most of the time, instead looking to perfect my typography. As a result, my ability to render images that are faithful to their sources has fallen. Many of my friends are illustrators, and particularly skilled at create naturalistic images. This causes me to expect a level of work from myself that is really beyond what I'm capable of at the moment. When a drawing doesn't come out the way that I want it too, rather than work off of the problems, I will attempt to skip the early steps that I need as a foundation to move forward. This only hurts my ability to render in the end. Doodling like this plays an important role because it provides a stress free situation in which I can work, so that I can clear my mind and build my skills in later attempts.