How can we use our pens for doodling? A ballpoint pen or mechanical pencil can produce a good doodle, but a fountain pen or a lead holder can help in generating real art. I will try to share some perspectives. For more ideas check out here.
Why doodle?
Doodling has several benefits.
- Better retention. Doodling during a lecture or a conversation may increase syncronization between the brain hemispheres. In experiments, this is translated into double (!) retention of information.
- Brainstorming. Some of our processing is visual. It is known that doodling puzzles and labyrinth increases problem-solving skills.
- Mindfulness. Capturing the here and now of a cityscape or a natural location.
- Spirituality. Capturing the imaginary landscape with spiritual value, as a part of transcendental visualization.
- Writing aid. Manga-like characters, tolkien’s maps… Some genres, especially science fiction and fantasy start from doodling.
- Visual art. If you doodle well, what you produce is real visual art. Leonardo’s diaries cost milllions, and some of the pages are just sketches in preparation for bigger works. Graffiti artists also doodle a lot, before they scale up their activities.
So, even if your doodling sucks you should consider doodling. As you improve, you can achieve more through your sketches.
Pen, pencil, or both?
For simple by-the-way doodling, we can use either pens or pencils.
More purposeful doodling often starts with ruling. Usually, we use an already marked paper, with pre-drafted dots, lines or squares. Alternatively, we introduce the ruling ourselves, typically with a hard pencil. Ruling helps with consistency and sizes. Very experienced doodles are already consistent and have an extremely good perception of size, so they can skip this stage,
Next, outlines are introduced. In theory, they need to be introduced with a hard pencil so we can add modification if needed. In reality, either a black pencil or a fine nib pen is used. This is simply more rewarding.
Then comes shading. There are many techniques. Some swab ink with water. Others use criss-cross patterns. If the ink or the lead allows for shading, some of the shadings is done simply by varying the pressure on the nib. Here you try to use the full potential of your tool.
And finally, details are added. Small variations in lines and small objects improve the creation and make it more memorable.
A typical doodling kit uses a hard pencil, two fine nib fountain pen for outlines, and a brush for applying diluted ink or a lead holder for shading.
And now, for real
To be honest, we will not carry a full doodling kit with us. Maybe artists do, but not the rest of us. It is likely that we will have a mechanical pencil of some sort, a writing pen, and a colored pen or highlighter.
A pencil may be used to set up the grid or the approximate position of what we are going to draw. Then we will add some outlines and shadings using the same pen. The shading is usually reserved for rendering 3D objects. Then with another pen or a highlighter we add details of a contrasting nature. Like fire vs ice, physical vs atmospheric, man-made vs natural. And if we like what we see, we will redo the sketch more seriously in a more controlled situation.
Most of us will repeat the same motives time after time, trying to find something new, something important missed initially, a creative breakthrough. We kind of create very few universes but generate many sketches for each.
We start doodling as kids
My daughter doodles and asks me to doodle. She has very few themes: princesses, unicorns, butterflies, cats. That’s about it. And she asks for variations upon variations of these motives. For many years, since she was two years old. She does not get tired.
People who doodle fantasy or comics will usually doodle fantasy or comics for years. Those who doodle landscapes cityscapes will continue to doodle just that. Calligraphers will draw letters and verses. They may be skilled to do anything they want with a pen and a pencil, but there are some natural themes, which we reiterate obsessively. For example, Tolkien would draw maps. Leonardo doodled machines. Michelangelo drafted anatomical illustrations. Obsessively, endlessly, often without a true purpose in our eyes.
When I was a kid I was doodling labyrinths. Till I was 22 years old, all of my notebooks were full of labyrinths. Then something happened, and most of my doodles started from calligraphy. Strange letters merged together. Till I was 44 years old. Then again something happened, and now I draw some strange 3D shapes with shading. No idea what changed in my brain, and why it is reflected in doodles only.
Lithography
In the hands of true artists, doodling is much more than doodling. The genre of lithography starts with a doodle, then shading is added. When the artist was happy with the result, it used to be transferred to wooden blocks or stone, and copies upon copies were imprinted on paper or cloth.
Durer and Goya were true masters of this art. When we visit museums and see quality lithography we get the same awe we get from seeing full-size paintings of these masters. Lithography was a limited edition art: there were only so many imprints one could make from a single stone or a wooden block.
Today the situation is very different. Anything can be scanned in a high-resolution scanner and multiplied as many times as you want. Many books, especially children’s books, contain a lot of illustrations that started as doodles. The illustrators are often more important than the authors of those books.
Ink prints
The birth of mass produces art in my mind is associated with oriental ink prints. Probably the most well-known and magnificent 19th-century woodblock print is Under the Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai.
In 764 the Empress Kōken commissioned one million small wooden pagodas, each containing a small woodblock scroll printed with a Buddhist text. Some say that the Japanese manga, Ukiyo-e painting and woodblock printing start from that period. Or maybe from a more ancient Chinese tradition. Anyway, the art riched its pean in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868) and it was massively exported to the west.
The mass production of woodblock prints in the Edo period was due to the high literacy rate of Japanese people in those days. The literacy rate of the Japanese in the Edo period was almost 100% for the samurai class, much higher than in Europe. Samurais were kind of bored due to the long period of piece and invested heavily in arts and crafts.
From the 17th century to the 19th century, ukiyo-e depicting secular subjects became very popular among the common people and were mass-produced. A publisher’s ownership of the physical woodblocks used to print a given text or image constituted the closest equivalent to a concept of “copyright” that existed at this time. Publishers or individuals could buy woodblocks from one another and thus take over the production of certain texts, but beyond the ownership of a given set of blocks (and thus a very particular representation of a given subject), there was no legal concept of the ownership of ideas.
Comics artists
Today manga or comics is a multibillion dollars genre, with Marvell and DC comics powerhouses worth billions of dollars. They draw their power from professional storytellers and artists working together and creating entire visual universes.
The initial storyboard is little more than a set of doodles. There are descriptions of the main characters and places with some corresponding doodles. The storytellers provide great background stories and poor graphics. The illustrators provide very detailed and interesting characters with the poor background. Then they work together and generate something truly spectacular. The ideation can take years of obsessive doodling. Yet this is totally worth it.
Our highest-grossing films and most important masterpieces usually come from obsessive doodling by very few misunderstood individuals. Walt Disney’s empire is the ultimate manifestation of this vision.
Calligraphy
Once we understand the massive economic power of professional doodlers, we go back to the roots of this art. To ancient Egypt probably. Egyptian painters and calligraphers were bound by religion to produce a very limited set of symbols and visual representations, which they did very faithfully. There were very few times they got creative freedom, like during the short reight of Ahnathon. Some say that our western culture, and especially the Pythagorean tradition comes from Egypt. There is no consensus. We do know that western culture was very choosing its motives.
Islamic culture was more limited, so Islamic and Jewish scholars doodled calligraphy. Beautiful letters and geometric patterns adorned Islamic books and temples for millennia. Modern algebra and algorithms started from doodles in the medieval empire of Khoresm.
Since ancient times doodles were used not just by artists, but also by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. They used dip pens and silverpoints instead of our ball pens and pencils, but otherwise, the methodology did not change much until the invention of the computer.
Doodling today
Now we have a very interesting set of possibilities. We can doodle the way our ancestors did, only we can scan and mass-produce our doodles. Alternatively, we can doodle digitally with a stylus or a smart pen, capturing our doodle directly in a computer.
In any case, human creative work typically starts with freestyle doodles and not from computer models. However, computers can also dream and doodle. When exposed to random patterns, AI models may generate works of art.
Why? Because doodling is a critical part not just of our history or of being human, but of intelligent processing in general.