Creativity - Do you doodle?

#Doodling #Creativity #Doodles #Drawing #Art #Design #Stressrelief

The subconscious mind is a powerful tool that we can learn to use.  In addition to using meditation or directing your dreams to provide you with answers while you sleep, you should also consider doodling as an opportunity to get in touch with it.

If you can put yourself in a relaxed state and just start drawing squiggles, lines, circles, and anything else that takes your fancy on a piece of paper who knows where it might lead.

Try this exercise.

1. Clear 15 minutes in your calendar and find an interruption free space to work in (doodle a do not disturb sign and hang it on the door perhaps?)
2. Organise your work space so your favorite writing or drawing implement is close by and you have plenty of paper.
3. Spend from 30 seconds to a minute taking deep breaths in to a count and then exhaling to double that count (so if it takes you 3 seconds to fill your lungs try to exhale for 6 to empty them).
4. Clear your mind as much as you can.
5. Pick up your implement and put the tip down on the paper.  Now start to draw and let it do what it may.

This is just an exercise but doodling can happen anywhere, under any conditions.  I don't recommend doodling in meetings unless you can do it fairly surreptitiously as it can be seen as a sign of not paying attention or of disrespect.  Unless you can design something totally awesome in line with the meetings objective in which case you should absolutely go for it.

Remember it's doodling.  There is no pressure.  You can keep your doodles, toss your doodles, or even redoodle over the top of your doodles.

There is also no rules or right way to do it.  Back in ancient times, when I was just a wee laddie, back when you had to be attached to a corded phone to carry on a conversation, I used to doodle a lot while talking on the phone.  I miss those days sometimes.  Sometimes the doodle would be affected by the conversation, sometimes it would have a mind of it's own.  Now days my doodling is much more infrequent.

Doodling as an opportunity to tap into your creativity.  You can also start your doodle with some sort of agenda in mind but try to let the pen or pencil flow across the paper to where ever it feels the need to go.

You can take a word relevant to your question and write it on the paper first and then doodle off that.

You can take an existing image and start doodling from that.

You can pick random words from a dictionary and try and doodle in elements of that word to whatever the core concept is you are working on.

Again there are no rules.  You just have to put aside some time to do it.

Here are a couple of video clips from a master doodler Vihart from Youtube.  Check out her channel for some more mind blowing information on all sorts of maths and music topic.

If you need proof that doodling is useful here's a link on a Doodle Study that was done back in 2009.

Happy doodling.