the doodle draw

“Let’s see how many foreshortened circles you can draw in a line!”

I step back from the board and watch all the blank sketchbook pages fill with variations on ellipses. It seemed really important to start with these basic shapes when I was crafting my Intro to Art lesson plan for this group of 9-12 year olds. The fundamentals of shading, how shapes are the basic construction blocks of any drawing, why light and shadow matter. You know, that artist toolbox stuff. But watching them right now, I start getting apprehensive. Is this helping? Or is this boring?

My first art teacher started with basic shapes too. She must have because I have the evidence in a well worn collection of drawing lesson books by Bruce McIntyre. All the practice pages have rows of lopsided attempts at ellipses, signed by my eight-year-old self. But, honestly, I don’t remember what I thought about drawing cubes and pyramids. Maybe I was bored too.

We finish the demonstration on shading using a flashlight and a treasure chest swiped at the last minute from my kids’ toy room. I have them experiment with light and heavy pressure for shadows on a sketched ball. And then again on a cube. We fill circles with variations in hardness and blackness because someone wanted to know what the H and B stood for in their 2H and 4B graphite pencils from Amazon.

And then it’s time for the Doodle Draw.

I started the Doodle Draw the second week of class in a moment of inspiration combined with a need to fill five extra minutes. I drew the first Doodle on the board and asked them to copy it and then turn it into whatever they wanted. Ever since then, they take turns being the Doodler. My only rule is that the Doodler must also participate which prevents them from going full Picasso in complexity. Today, the Doodlers both choose circular shapes. The first is a circle enclosed in a lopsided quadrilateral, and the second is a large circle filled with two smaller offset circles. I set my watch for 3 minutes. They draw with furious concentration.

Then they hold up their sketches and suddenly I remember why it was never boring.

Where I saw technical circles and angles, they saw a dragon, an anime cat, a snowplow, a washing machine, a Thanksgiving table setting, an anvil, the engine of a jet. For them, the Doodle is just a doorway into unbound imagination. A few simple lines on the page, and they can walk through the looking glass like Alice. That’s why I can’t remember learning all those basic shapes at the start of my art journey. They weren’t just shapes. They were the keys to taking pictures from my mind and getting them on paper for others to see. It’s what I’ve always loved about art. And it all starts with a Doodle.