ENTERING MY DOODLE ERA

I don’t know what flipped in my brain to make this possible. I never ever thought I’d be a freehand ink doodler or that i’d have aesthetic sketchbook spreads but I’ve recently started enjoying AND LIKING THE OUTCOME OF doodling like this in my sketchbook. With a marker. Just going straight for it. Without a care and having fun.

Maybe it’s because my skills have finally started to catch up with my tastes. Or maybe I was just waaaaay more anxious for most of life than I thought. But it all seems so much less serious than it used to. I freehand doodled this street and a car? Six months ago if you asked me to draw a car I’d probably just cry. Now even though it’s nowhere near accurate, I still think it looks really cool. I like the wonkyness.

Are they actually good, or is just that this style of drawing is popular in the zeitgeist so I’m being more forgiving? Does objective GOODness actually exist at all, or is it all based on trends? I dunno. All I know is that I like doodling now. I’m a doodler. I mean I was born a doodler. I doodled all over my homework and notebooks. But after awhile I didn’t think my doodles looked good. Like you know how a drawing can be ugly but in a cool way and that’s somehow different than an obviously amateur drawing? I’m not sure if there is a quantifiable thing that makes one cool and one amateur, maybe it’s 100% subjective and non artists can’t tell the difference. On Creative Pep Talk, Andy J Pizza posits that if the taste/skill gap is closed then our own artwork should be the art we like the most because we can perfectly tailor it to our taste.

I’m starting to finally feel like I’m getting there. I think one thing that kickstarted it was when I began using these felt-tip pens to draw thumbnails for my stories. Before that, I was in a ballpoint pen phase, but I was still relying on unsure, light-handed sketching. But when I began thumbnailing a picture book, I got annoyed at how long it took to draw a legible idea. I didn’t need these drawings to be “good” I just needed them to get an idea down for what will happen on a page. So I grabbed a felt tip pen and went to town. I ended up really liking how these thumbnails looked compared to the ones I’d done before. THEN - and here is the key component - I spent like two months drawing thumbnails for a potentially 300 page graphic novel with this method. The more I did it the more I had to think about compositions before placing marks, I had to actually see it instead of finding it with sketchy lines. It also helps with focusing on the important thing in the panel, instead of over drawing.

You’ll hear a lot of artists fall into this fallacy, where it feels like if a piece is too easy to create then it must not be good. And we’ll be annoyed at ourselves when a 5-minute doodle looks better than a piece we labored over for days. Maybe that’s just a hurdle we all have to get over. You start out with everything being difficult, but as the gap between your taste and your skills closes, it gets easier. At first, that’s scary, but eventually, you become sure of your skills, and you can finally focus on making images that you like. Drawing like this I can feel my brain getting better at visualizing the lines I want to put on the page. I can feel my hands getting faster and more nimble. And I feel like any idea I have, I have the skills to execute it exactly to my taste. Or very close to it. And I don’t really care if it’s to other peoples taste. I know there are people out there with similar tastes to mine, and I want to weed out all the lame-os.