drawanyway.com

Do you doodle? The chances are, you do - those with an artistic bent often find a pen and a piece of paper just too tempting to leave untried.

Whether you go for the classic doodles - cubes, circles, abstract shapes - or something a little more ambitious - say, sketches of the people around you, or entire imaginary cityscapes - have you ever thought of doing a little more with them?

By definition, a doodle tends to sit on the page, unloved and unattended to, until your notebook gets used up and thrown away. But it need not be that way: you can breath life into your doodles. Give a doodle new hope today.

Doodle, doodle, doodle. Sorry, Ive just written the word so much it’s starting to look really odd.

Erm, where was I? Oh yes, here’s the thing about doodles: because you do them while your mind is on other things, and with no pressure, you’ll often find that you feel freer to try out new techniques. If the results are good, why not tear them out and stick them in your sketchbook for future reference?

Here are a few other ideas for turning doodles into gold:

Scan into your computer, and see what it looks like replicated many times across a blank space. You could be making great patterns.

Scan into your computer and try filling in spaces with the paintbrush or paintbucket tool.

Or go old-school, and use paint or crayons or felt-tips to colour your image in.

Tear around your doodle and include it in a collage.

Blow your small doodles up big.

See if they look like anything else.

My basic message: the doodle need not be finished when you come off the phone or out of that boring meeting: it can be the beginning of something new.