Some Housekeeping
Whew! It’s been a whirlwind over in these parts. I just wrapped a week of unexpected travel to help out a family member, and a work event on the near horizon is also taking my focus. I’ve started getting some scribbles in here and there, so the impromptu hiatus is now over. Thanks for your patience while doodles took a temporary back burner!
I’ll likely do a few quick hits here on the newsletter over the next few weeks, and you’ll see things pick up again in earnest as we head into cozy season. I have some fun holiday projects planned, so I thought I’d use this post to share a process peek that examines last year’s obsession.
About this time last year I decided to try my hand at a take on The Twelve Days of Christmas. Some of the results I liked a lot, and others were interesting but not what I had been aiming for—too overworked or stiff. In a moment of frustration, I decided to do a “speed round” doodle of nine ladies dancing, hoping I could loosen things up again.
The result made me happy—several doodle-y, cheerful characters, impressionistic but still full of personality. To my eye the energy of their dancing seemed real, like these ladies were spinning each other around with momentum that could propel them off the page if someone unfroze them.
I wanted to maintain the energy of these initial scribbles while getting to a final composition that worked for the piece. The dancing pairs I’d churned out quickly would need to become trios.
After the initial black and white scribbles, the next step was to hide the background and add a layer of opaque white behind the doodle.
When I go through the inefficient process of cleaning up edges like this, I am forced to define outlines of each figure that I would otherwise allow my imagination to fill in. You can see how adding and erasing portions of the white layer behind the hair and neck of one dancer leads to some decisions about her personality:
With the white layer fully defined, I turned the background back on. The new layer now acted as a bounded canvas on which I could experiment with color and texture, affecting just those portions of the doodle that I’d defined as being “of” the dancers.
Last, I added a new layer so I could test out a background “wash” of color. This wash unified the image as a single group, and also aligned its design with others in the series.
When I decide to pursue additional steps on a piece, I sometimes pull more from it than I originally imagined. Other times, I find that I prefer the first loose, unconscious scribblings. Maybe it is a matter of mood? I always hope I can give a doodle more presence without diluting any of its core energy.
Process Peek: Extra Steps