Creative Every Day

The places that doodles and play lead to…

January 7th, 2008

Holy moly, creative kids! The list of CED2008 participants has grown quite a bit. So, forgive me for not getting around to see you all as often as I'd like to. However, I've been blown away by all the inspiration and creativity that has been shared thus far. I'm glad that this gentle challenge has inspired so many people to join in. The group energy is sparkly and wonderful. Which reminds me, I wanted to share the lovely new blog of Christine Mason Miller called, Sparkletopia. It is full of daily creative sparks, inspiring links and lots of color. Love it!

The hubster and I spent a quick weekend with his family celebrating a late Christmas and we had such a nice time. It was relaxing and silly and I was so glad I was feeling good. Sometimes travel and people and being "on" all the time is totally exhausting for me. But I managed to feel good (getting good sleep helped a lot) for the entire trip. For creativity, I started a doodle on Saturday and used water soluble pastels to color it in. I started this doodle in a fun way that I recommend trying out. I simply put my hand (with pen) to paper and made a quick squiggly swirl. Then I looked at it and it suggested the figure that I created. The first time I ever tried this was in a cartooning class I took as a kid. The teacher would make a scribble on a piece of paper for all the students and then we'd turn the scribble into something. I still do this for myself sometimes and it's loads of fun!

On Sunday, the hubster wanted to watch a football game with his dad, so I sat down with them and started doodling in my sketchbook. My mother-in-law was talking to me about art while I drew and told me what she thought the doodles could be. It was fun following her suggestions and combining her ideas with my own to create the drawing. I had drawn the tree on the left first and then she suggested drawing a second tree that faced away from it so that they were like male and female trees dancing in the breeze. She also suggested the musical notes in the breeze.

Doodling also leads to some fun happy accidents. I drew the above tree doodle on the back of the page that I drew the woman in pastels, so when drawing the pattern at the top of the tree doodle, it pressed the pastels onto the page underneath it (which had little sketches for the cycles painting on it) in the pattern shape. So cool! I may have to play with that in other ways.  This is a good example of the fun places that playing leads to!