1. Doodled by hand until he reached a point of feeling finished (See the Structured Doodling 1 post)
2. Scanned in the artwork and opened it in Photoshop.
3. Levels adjusted to make the blacks black and the extra background lines painted out.
4. Copied into Illustrator.
5. Live traced, expanded and then copied so that there are 2 versions.
6. The 1st copy was simplified a lot (Object – Path – Simplify)
7. It was then then ungrouped and the yellow/red/purple shapes coloured and the rest discarded.
8. The 2nd shape was simplified less than the 1st one (this creates the slight miss-match of the coloured parts to the main black parts).
9. It was then ungrouped and the unwanted parts discarded.
10. The 2 versions were then overlaid with eachother to create the finished illustration
11. A few final touches involving moving a few points to tidy it up and there we go: Crazios!

He was so cute I’ve put him on a t-shirt…

Meet Crazios!

I was at a bit of an inspiration low this evening and decided to do some structured doodling…

Structured doodling is a concept I came up with or stumbled across some time ago. And this little fellow worked out so well I figured the concept is good enough to share. I know that being artistic doesn’t always mean that artists are overflowing with ideas. Sometimes we need prompting!

Structured doodling starts with a set of lines or shapes on a page – straight, curved, concentric circles… whatever. You can draw the lines by hand or do them in a software program and then print them out. The idea is to let the lines influence your doodling.  Put some music on and just let it happen. Try not to guide it too much and try not to have an end result in mind – think of it as a meditation in 2D. BUT if at some point your doodle starts to take an interesting shape that catches your imagination – don’t resist!  Shape it more consciously as you like.

I am going to do more of these … and may even dig out some older ones too. It should become a regular feature. And who knows? it might even turn into a book. That’s rather exciting!

So… today’s Structured doodling session involves many straight lines crossing the page at random angles. If you would like to use the page I create:

download the base page here (pdf).

And check out this tutorial if you are interested in how I created the finished illustration:

How Crazios came to be:

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Until next time… Happy doodling!

P.S. When you have had a play – share the result on the Scrabooli Studo flickr group. … I am realy looking forward to seeing what you come up with…

Or at least that is what the dictionary calls it. But what if there is more to it? Just how absentminded do you have to be, for it to be a doodle? What if the same ‘doodle style’ is used deliberately? When does a doodle become something else?

For a start, just take a moment to lay out in your mind what type of image you consider to be a doodle.
Is it abstract? angular? curvaceous? small? dotty? random? useless? a mental distraction? ….

…

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Now, consider this… you do a little doodle on the side of a memo pad, or on the edge of the essay your working on, or even in your journal, or sketch book… The doodle gets lost for a while, then you find it again and are struck by the image in some way… You take that doodle and port it into illustrator, trace it and use it for something (a design element in a magazine spread, decoration for a product, or artwork in it’s own right,  for example). Now, is that still a doodle, or are you going to call it a sketch, or a drawing, or a design element now?

Now consider further… you liked the style of the 1st doodle and decide to make some more in a similar vein. The finished item looks very similar to the 1st doodle… but you did them deliberately rather than ‘absentmindedly’… Or you deliberately set out to make some more in an absentminded manner – as in the state of mind required to hold and use the pen… Are these still doodles?

OK, now what about concept sketches?… your sitting there at your desk (or on the couch) coming up with the 1st ideas for something (logo/artwork/business card/movie character etc) and your absentmindedly putting down any idea that crosses your mind… “rough drawing made absentmindedly” … are these doodle too?

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So…  perhaps a doodle is a rough drawing made absentmindedly & without a purpose.
And when it gets a purpose, then it becomes (is named) something else: concept sketch, design element, wild & crazy idea… etc.

Right. That was an interesting dwardle through a lot of quetions. It’s late, and I’m not sure if this post has gone quite where I wanted it to. but it’s all an interesting thought. By the by, I invented the word scrabooli to cover a doodle-looking-type image that had been done deliberatly. …