April's Random Doodle Club: Maps

 Hello Doodlers!

It was lovely to see you as always. Thank you for turning up, especially on Easter weekend.

Immy started off with a space filling doodle to warm up:

* Roughly draw around your hand for shape, and then fill the space with different kinds of geographical markers for things 

It's clear that I have no idea what the symbols are for farms or libraries, but I think you can get the idea.

Next Immy guided us in a leveller exercise: remember the whole point of this was to be terrible at drawing, so we used different methods to bring us all down a few notches. 

* Start by drawing the outline of where you live, or place you are familiar with. Throw a dice to see what method you will use: 1. use your non-dominant hand, 2. looking down but not at the paper, 3. turn your paper around to face away from you / towards the camera and draw, 4. no taking the pen off the paper, 5. draw squinting at the page through the corner of your eye, 6. draw with one eye shut.

* Next draw a human made / constructed structure that you like, for example a cathedral, library, museum, landmark. Again roll the dice to see how you will draw this.

* Lastly pick a natural landmark that you particularly like, like forests, mountains, moors, plains, or rivers. Again roll the dice to see your method.

Again, my knowledge of geography is atrocious. Britain looks like that, right?! (Spoiler alert: it doesn't.)

Then I guided a breathing exercise involving triangles: the idea of this is to relax and not worry about what the picture looks like. We did 3 mins but you can spend as long as you like doing this. 

* Move your pen in one direction as you breathe in, then a line for the pause between, and then in the other direction as you breathe out. If you are breathing naturally you will probably get some form of isosceles  triangle, however you can also do this to a rhythm of 4 beats for each part which will get you a nice, even sided triangle. It is completely up to you!

Immy did some lovely neat triangles with lots of space around them, while I did some kind of 1970s style geometric triangles that are all linked together in a kind of muddle.

The next exercise was to draw a Map representing You: this can be a fun thing to do or you can get deep with it, whatever you like. It can make a great gratitude practice to list things that you are grateful for, or you can list things that you love. Both of these help rejuvenate us after a tiring day.

* First take some time to think about what kind of map you want to draw: you could do a mind map, a treasure map, an ordinance survey map, an elevation map, co-ordinates, star charts... whatever you like.

* Next think about what kinds of things you want to represent: you could put in things you love, things you think about most, things you do all day, parts of your personality, whatever you feel like.

* Give everything labels and really fun names if you can think of them. 

I did a star chart for this one that was mostly about my values and personality traits since I am a little bit more psychologically minded. One of my favourite kinds of map is a pirate treasure map, and I have used those with this exercise before. Or those maps you get at the beginning of books like Lord of the Rings, they're pretty awesome too.

Immy went for a classic contour map with things that they think about lots, like moths, plants, cool funghi, rocky cliffs, donuts and lichen.

Then I passed back to Immy for the final exercise, one of our classic random number doodles. These are great if you want to doodle but you don't want to make any decisions - you just let dice, cards or coins make them for you. 

* Draw a compass at the top of the page.

* Throw a dice to see how many islands you will draw in your archipelago. Draw them.

* Then using a D4 to determine direction and a D6 to determine how many islands, begin to populate the islands with stuff. For example: if we rolled a 3 and then a 2, so the South two islands would have mountains or hills on them. Then for trees, if we rolled a 2 and then 6 so we would doodle trees onto the six most Eastern islands. You can add in trees, a village (roll the dice for the number of houses), hills or mountains, any natural features you like.

* If there are any islands that have nothing at all on them, you can put a castle, or a volcano on that takes up all the space. If some of them have a little bit of something on them and then lots of space you can always add a nature reserve for rare plants or animals or insects (or all three if you are so inclined). 

And then we finished up with the space filling doodle we started at the beginning. 

We hope you enjoyed it! Let us know if you were inspired to do your own doodles, or if you have any questions or feedback for us.

Take care 'til next month, 

Immy, Maria and Nat