Artistic spirit manifests in many different forms. It can be through your first drawing, it can be through your love of nature, and it can even be through splashing paint on a canvas without reason. The arts don’t discriminate by origin, and show us that creativity has multiple stories over time. I myself, like many other illustrators and hobbyists alike, have had multiple inspirations for what to draw.Â
However, apart from the many influences that I could list from the top of my head, from comic artists to small time clay models and stop motion animations, I wanted to focus on one thing I believe to be a major inspiration and what I believe to be a mirror into someone’s creativity: notebook doodles. Doodling has been an old tradition for many people during school. Whether it’s during a boring class, or even in the minutes you spend alone in the library or after lunch, I, and many others in my immediate social circle, have found ourselves doodling in our notebooks or on whatever piece of paper we can get our hands on.Â
Doodling, for me, has been a way to practice drawing faces and facial expressions, but increasingly it has also reflected on my mood during class. I look back at my doodles during a statistics class, and I always find faces of exhaustion, or exaggerated faces of tiredness. Though, to be fair, I would not be surprised if a statistics student were to doodle the same expressions in a history class that I look forward to. Doodles, along with our expressions, can express our opinions on the world around us, and more interestingly from my experience, where our minds take us when we zone out. My friend, despite claiming he doesn’t know how to draw, finds himself drawing mandalas and patterns that I myself can’t do. A junior, from when I was in an art club, liked to do abstract doodles, whether on the notebook or the whiteboard which I couldn’t comprehend, but found beautiful.
A person’s notebook doodles could also be a way of understanding humour. I remember reading my textbook during an English class back when I was in elementary school, and the person next to me, rather than reading, decided to doodle fart sound effects on the picture on the textbook page. A rather crude imagination, yet to any 9 to 10 year old at the time, this was seen as the highest tier of comedy and it brought people together to his desk. Similarly, years later in middle school, many of my classmates would crowd around someone’s desk when they doodled talking cars or their favourite show to watch on television. I would eventually become friends with those classmates due to our shared interests in the arts and how we avoid boredom, especially if it’s a mathematics or physics class. Doodles have the power to connect people through either crude or wholesome interests, and can allow you to explore something new altogether.Â
Through these experiences and exchanges, I like to believe that the simple act of doodling in a notebook to escape boredom can be transformative. The ability to connect with other artists, and the ability to gain new interests is one part of it, but another involves how we see the world from each other’s eyes. And through our doodles we develop both, a sense of humour, and a sense of empathy towards each other.