Do you Doodle?

I am a serial doodler, give me a pencil and a an old envelope and I can keep myself happy for ages. There is something so relaxing about doodling away with no reason or end in plan, just going where the pencil takes you.

Emma Stacey won the National Doodle Day competition in March

I tend to always start with faces which then become odd characters, which in turn blend into patterns and shapes until the page is merged into one big doodle. Sometimes out of doodles come ideas for illustrations but often as not they are just random bits of nothing with no purpose.

I'm working on the interactive book app again at the moment and, as with most projects, I started with a more directed kind of doodle, a page filled with scribbles of possible ideas and notes. I know it's not true doodling but it's a nice relaxing part where imagination can run wild and there is no pressure to get it right or wrong at this stage.

doodling while thinking of ideas for the new interactive book yesterday

I try to encourage my kids to doodle sometimes rather than always produce a finished picture. As they get older they can be far too hard on themselves when their ideas don't come out quite as they wanted on the paper, when younger they were simply just happy just to experiment. We lose that as we get older and get frustrated if we don't produce a finished image we think is 'good enough', it's nice sometime to take that restriction away from ourselves and just draw for no more reason than to make some interesting patterns and marks on the paper.

Look, it's even good for your brain:

According to a study published in the scientific journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, doodling can aid a person's memory by expending just enough energy to keep one from daydreaming, which demands a lot of the brain's processing power, as well as from not paying attention. Thus, it acts as a mediator between the spectrum of thinking too much or thinking too little and helps focus on the current situation. The study was done by Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, who reported that doodlers in his experiment recalled 7.5 pieces of information (out of 16 total) on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group made of non-doodlers.

So there you go, lots of reasons to keep on doodling!