March's Random Doodle Club

 Hello again!

Welcome to the second Random Doodle Club round up. Thanks very much to all of you who attended the workshop and asked questions, we had a really great time. We hope you enjoyed it too! The point of the workshop is to learn ways to draw where you don't have to make too many decisions - so you let dice rolls or card shuffles make the decisions for you. 

Here is a write up of the exercises we did, so that you can revisit them at home if you like. We always love seeing your creations, so feel free to share them with us on Twitter or Instagram. 

Immy started off with a  a warm up and then onto a levelling exercise as always - so we were all equally terrible at drawing. (Remember, you don't need any skills to do any of these exercises!). The only thing you really need is pen and paper for this. Immy lists various dice and cards, but if you don't have any Maria assures me that you can just look up 'roll dice' on Google and you should get some websites that generate numbers for you. 

Warm up: Worms

Fill a page with worm-like tube shapes. Fill the worms with as many different patterns as you can think of - spots, stripes, squares, zig-zags, etc.

Leveller exercise: Imaginary Animals

Draw this activity with your non-dominant hand (if you're ambidextrous, draw without looking directly at the paper). The idea is to be as terrible as possible and have fun. 

Use the following dice rolls to decide the shape of your animal:

1) roll a D4 (a four sided die) to decide body shape. We used 1=round, 2=oval, 3=triangle, 4=square. Only draw the body at this stage, the head and limbs come later!

2) roll again to decide the shape of the head (same rules as above). Only draw the head, no features yet.

3) roll a D8 to decide the number of limbs. Draw on the limbs wherever you like, but no tails or wings yet.

4) roll a D6, if you get an odd number draw that many tails and if you get an even number draw that many wings.

5) roll a D6 to decide on the number of eyes. Again, you can draw these wherever you want.

6) to finish up the face, spend a minute adding features or a pattern on the body. You can use your dominant hand for this, but do it without lifting your pen off the paper (drawing in a continuous line).

This is one I did from a practice session we had:

Next I guided some mindful drawing.

Drawing with the breath

    All you need to do is move your pen / pencil one way as you breathe in, and move the opposite way as you breathe out. You don't need to change the way that you breath at all, just go with what your body is doing. 

Some of us start from a point on the paper and go up and down, some go round so it ends up looking like a flower, I tend to end up with a figure 8 / infinity type doodle. Either way, it's all good.

This exercise comes from a gorgeous book called Draw Breath by Tom Granger. 

Doodle animals

    To start, draw a few random little doodles on your page. The type you do when you're trying out a new pen in the shop before buying, or if you're absentmindedly doodling while on hold on the phone for whatever reason. 

    Have a look at a doodle, and see what animal it reminds you of and transform it into an animal. Snails are great our of spirals, if you have a spiky mark, that could be a hedgehog maybe? Whatever you feel like. 

This is a lovely exercise to do with other people, maybe you could draw doodles and then exchange papers and complete animals on someone else's doodles. 

Draw yourself as an animal

    First, take a few minutes to breathe and think about your positive qualities. This could be anything you love about yourself - maybe you love your laugh, or your hair, or the way you walk, or particular personality traits. You might love that you are clever, or kind, or funny, or sociable, introverted, or  a quick thinker. You might also think about an experience - I love to swim because it makes my body feel strong, for example, or I really love travelling and going places. 

    Think about what animal you would be based on those traits, and then draw it. It doesn't have to be picture perfect, but I think it's nice to take time over this exercise and spend time thinking about your own good qualities. 

I did a Platypus for this one because I think I'm a bit unusual, I love water but also land, I'm quite sociable. 

Then we went back to Immy for some more randomness. 

Nests

Draw three large circles that mostly fill your page. We're going to turn each one into a doodle of a nest, in the classic cartoon style - eggs in the middle, nest material visible round the edge (like a doughnut shape). The nest can belong to any kind of animal, real or imaginary - a bird, reptile, insect, dinosaur, bee, octopus, whatever! You can make up a name for your animal at the end. 

To design each nest, use the following dice rolls and card draws:

1) roll a D6 to choose the nest material. 1=sticks, 2=rocks, 3=grass, 4=leaves, 5=mud, 6=trash.

2) roll a D8 and draw that many eggs in the centre of the nest. Make them any shape you like. 

3) Pick a card. If it is 1-10 in value, draw that many spots if the symbols are black (clubs, spades) or stripes if they are red (hearts, diamonds). If you get a J/K/Q/ Joker, if the symbol is black, draw cracks on your egg as if it is hatching, if it is red then draw the egg hatching (you can draw a hole with two eyes peeking out or a beak even).

These are my nests:

Warm down: Bugs on a branch

Fill your page with stick shapes. Doodle as many different types of bug standing on your sticks as you can think of, like ants, beetles, butterflies, moths, slugs, spiders, millipedes, caterpillars etc.

I hope you enjoyed! Let me know if you have any questions!

See you next month,

Nat, Immy and Maria