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Doodling may seem like a fun little thing you do between other things, and it is, but it’s also turned into a legitimate genre of crafting, with people writing whole books about different ways to doddle.
I think that’s kind of cool, because it helps those of us who feel we can’t draw get over that a little bit. You can follow the examples in a book and practice and learn and be inspired without having to start completely from scratch.
I recently took some time to play with Craft-a-Doodle: 75 Creative Exercises from 18 Artists by Jenny Doh, and it was actually a lot of fun. (As usual, not an affiliate link.)
About the Book
The book is 144 pages and most doodle prompts cover a two-page spread. There’s a look at the finished doodle and a description of what you need for the prompt, instructions and tips. For more complex doodles, step-by-step drawings are shown.
Many of the doodles are done or can be done with just a pen and paper, but others call for specific kinds of ink, pens, watercolors and watercolor paper, etc. If you’re new to doodling, art journaling and the like and don’t have a lot of special supplies, you can stick to the basic ones or improvise with what you have to give the prompts a try.
There are all sorts of ideas in here, from how to doodle faces to writing a word and framing it with doodles, drawing a dress on an old book page and making dream catchers, to name a few.
I picked some of the basic ones that looked interesting and doodled a couple of pages in my Smash book.
It was a lot of fun to have some direction, and I think that I would feel more confident in my drawing and “doodling as art” abilities if I worked with this book regularly.
If you’d like to get into doodling but you aren’t quite sure what to draw, or if you’d like to get your doodles looking more like what you think of as drawings, I think you’ll like this book, too.