Mod round 2

More of the same. Just experimenting with shape and color, using one of my favorite doodles as a starting point. This was also my first shot at playing with pastels, a brand new material for me that I clearly need to learn more about.

Lost

Third in my college doodle series. Yes, it has a solution. No, I don't have it solved anywhere. Yes, it took me forever.

Into the archives

Sometimes I forget that I have a whole stash of drawings to, well, draw from.

Dating from ca. 1997/1998, this followed the completion of the doodle seen in this post. In creating this, I made a conscious effort to create negative space, though I did my best to NOT consciously direct the overall composition of the whole. It was an exercise in tedium and took me months' worth of lecture hours to get this far. I developed a sense of wanting to balance the size of the individual boxes as well as the size and spacing of the negative space. Like I said, I was trying not to direct the end product, but I definitely would decide things like, "I've done too many small open areas, time to leave a big one," or, "That last set of boxes was too regular, I should start adding a bunch of weird shaped ones."

I think I had the goal of filling the whole page. And I don't think I chose to stop where I stopped, I think I just ran out of school year and never picked it up again.

The full size image is pretty large, any smaller and the detail started to go away.

Crisis averted.

I found it! I found it!

A week of mild anxiety is now behind me. A second, more thorough, search of the closet-of-boxes has unearthed my beloved sketch book. I knew it had to be somewhere within the confines of our home, but that didn't make me any less unhappy about not being able to find it. Perhaps, now that half the contents of the boxes are strewn around the guest room, this will motivate me to finish unpacking all my crap, 7 months after the move.

Now that I am once again in possession of the seminal collection of my pieces, I can really get to the meat of this blogging project. And I'm going to start with what I think is my favorite one, and the first entry into one of the sub genres of my attempts at drawing - doodles gone mad.

Every so often, I'll start a doodle that becomes self perpetuating. It'll start with some shape, usually. A circle, a square, an amorphous blob. Then I'll repeat it, maybe next to it maybe larger and enclosing the first one. And then I'll continue to repeat it, adding variations. It's no longer a circle, instead it's an oval, or a squished oval, or the old standby amorphous blob. Before I know it, I've imposed some loose set of "rules" on it. "It's gotta be an enclosed shape, not crossing any of the others on the page. There should be a minimum and a maximum space allowed between each one. One shape may enclose another." Etc.

99% of the time, I end up with some stupid doodle that hangs around for a while and eventually gets tossed. But on occasion I'll step back from it and it strikes me as interesting enough to keep. This one was exemplary. Mind you, I was paying little to no attention to the overall shape of this thing. I was actually probably thinking I would eventually fill the whole page. But I got to this point and it just felt done. I really wish I could take more credit for it, but, as you may have gathered, I can't really draw. So the best I can hope for is the lucky happenstance of a doodle with an interesting structure ending up in an equally interesting overall form.

Sorry for the large full size image on this one, but I think it deserves the detail.