Bad Doodlers or Great Artists?

Have you ever been at a party or around friends in public and the opportunity to doodle comes up? And despite being confident enough in your art, you suddenly realize you can’t figure out how to draw?

In the past, I know that I’ve used the terms doodling and drawing pretty interchangeably, but I’ve sort of come to realize that making clean doodles and making art are pretty different skills. Doodling is a method of drawing, but drawing is a bit more than doodling. In hindsight this seems obvious, but in the moment it’s so easy to think that you can’t draw when you’re trying to doodle.

I realized this a few weeks back when doodling on a whiteboard with some friends. Some drew careful marks and made a silly drawing. Some had to erase a few times, but got there. And then there’s me, who doodled and… really wondered what happened once things came out of that marker. I just can’t do it. My doodles might have bad proportions, or perspective, and every time I draw them, I’m like, oh my gosh, what have I done? Why can’t I draw? I can draw in my sketchbook fine, so what happened here?

So I spent some time thinking about this. Maybe a bit of it is not really having warmed up for the day or using a medium I’m unfamiliar with, but I think there’s something more: making clean one-shot doodles is done one of two ways that feel clear to me: the first is a skill where you teach yourself how to draw using symbols, 2D symbols, to get what you want. The other is just being so far along with art that you’re able to mentally figure out the 2D shapes of something by imagining them in 3D, which hey, cool – but I don’t think that’s what most people are doing.

When you’re learning to draw in general, symbol drawing isn’t really a useful thing because you want to learn how things look in perspective and visualize how things are in 3D. But if you’re doing that on a whiteboard and you’re wanting to draw really quickly and get that first line down correctly, you’re going to start learning symbols. Symbol drawing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not a method that really helps you learn, nor will you encounter it if you’re specifically trying to learn to draw.

It’s a way of adding shortcuts to things that you do know how to draw already. If you’ve drawn tons of faces, or hands, or certain characters, you might know the kinds of lines to make to draw them really quickly. It’s something you’ve learned by accident by drawing things over and over, or that you’ve spent time separately learning on purpose. But it is a different, more specific skill than what you’d use for most art. If you’ve grown up doodling all your life and have only now decided to focus on art, you might find that doodles come easy to you! That’s neat. But if you’re starting from scratch like I have, doodling will seem difficult.

Certainly there’s the pressure to perform in social situations. If you’re drawing with others, you might start drawing in a different manner than if you were just alone. If you think that’s the case, see if you can draw on a chalkboard or whiteboard in private and see how things go. For me, I still take… a while to get something doodled, and have to rely on some manner of construction and sketching to get shapes I want before I can do it again “clean”. Both the skill of clean doodling and the dynamics of social situations are added complications to drawing, and they are things you can practice once you’re comfortable.

The point I’m getting to here is that you can still be a great artist yet be absolutely terrible at making goofy doodles. But you can also be great at both! They’re separate things to practice. If you feel like your doodling skill is a little weak and you want to fix it, by all means, go practice it. But if you’re trying to learn to draw, don’t worry if you can’t doodle on command. Those doodles actually can be quite difficult. I think I might try practicing it at some point, but I’m happy where I’m at for the moment. Every doodler is an artist, but not every artist has to know how to doodle. You’re valid either way. Go doodle with some friends, or be cozy and draw on your own. Just have fun and make art you enjoy.