I was asked by Kate Worum to create an illustration about water for a project she’s working on at WellDone.

I often use Adobe Illustrator to doodle, to make an image with no plan in mind, just play around with shapes and color and see what happens.

For this illustration, I set up a few simple rules for the doodle. The format was 6×6″ so I began with a blue square. Then, since I wanted it to be a face, I began with two circular eyes. After that, I made a drop shape to use as the only shape for the rest of the image. I could re-size this shape and rotate it, but I could not distort it, redraw it, or crop it (cropping could occur if the shape extend beyond the format edge). The palette was limited to three values, white, black, and blue as the middle value. My final rule was to create a left/right symmetry to reflect the symmetry of the eyes and the left/right symmetry of the drop shape (not counting the eyes, this rule was broken once, can you spot it?).

Again, I had no plan for this, other than a face. Would it be a human face? an animal?

a Proboscis monkey?

a bear?

a lemur?

an odd-looking man with a mustache?

a butterfly?

a clown or masked wrestler?

But, eventually, what began to appear…

…was a tiger!

a decorative tiger!

with a winged one-eyed bug on its nose!

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I made this for my sketchbook exchange with a friend of mine, started out as a drawing of David Suchet as Poirot, using a Nikko G-pen nib and brown ink, then became overrun with some doodling using  Dr. Martin’s True Blue dye.

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This began as a doodle with Nikko G-pen nibs and red ink, added gouache for the light blue areas.

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For the final project in one of my classes, I had my students make a digital doodle illustration where they created an image in Illustrator, Photoshop, or Painter without a plan, just started with a mark or shape and then worked from there, letting the initial mark and subsequent reactive marks build up to a final image. I do this in demos quite often, especially in Illustrator because I’m demonstrating specific tools. When I demonstrate in Photoshop or Painter, I usually start out with a reference sketch. Above is my digital doodle demo that began with a light blue circle.

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This is a doodle with collage from one of my sketch exchange books, random drawings around this tree, also incorporated some collage using Eric Carle’s technique. The pink is ink that had bled through from the previous page.

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Some messy drawings, playing with my new Nikko G-pen nibs and colored ink, with some dyes and gouache applied with brush.

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