Sketchbook Club International

Functional doodling, this I like. From afar, Jason Sho Green’s ballpoint pen portraits could look like any other portrait you’ve ever seen. But come a little closer and you’ll notice that some of the dark areas are actually made up of drawings of people, creatures, animals and more. Like magnificent modern-day mosaics, they’re filled with such hidden surprises, one could literally look at them [...]

More nice things being said about the utility of doodling: Research shows that illustrating concepts develops creative reasoning skills. The most striking thing was the effort that students would apply to learning about science when they read and then drew what they could understand from the text, and how much enjoyment they derived from doing this. Back in the late 30s/early 40s, the Nuns would beat [...]

Here’s a cute idea: a make-your-own music visualizer. Doodleizer.com is a Flash-based (tool? toy? toyl?) that takes whatever doodles and scribbles you make and “animates” them to a song you select. Momentous? Stunning? Life-altering? No, but as I said, cute, and doodle-related so it merits a post. Doodleizer.com

It’s not often we forward other people’s content, but Sunni Brown gets it.

Doodling may be better described as ‘markings to help a person think.’ Most people believe that doodling requires the intellectual mind to shutdown, but this is one misrepresentation that needs correcting. There is no such thing as a mindless doodle. The act of doodling is the mind’s attempt to engage before succumbing to mindlessness. Doodling serves a myriad of functions that result in thinking, albeit in disguise.