How did your doodling go? Doodling is a bit like using free writing to just let ideas spill onto the page. Without the constraints of worrying whether the end result is going to be fit for public consumption, your creative mind can start to have fun. I started my doodles last week by splashing watercolour paints across white card. I didn’t worry about the colours I was using, although it has to be said that I generally stick to a very muted palette anyway. If you take a look at some of my past work here, you’ll see that I don’t do much in the bright and cheerful side of the colour wheel. When I’m stuck for ideas, I like to look at the work of a couple of my artistic heroes: you can see John Knapp Fisher’s work here for example. I buy postcards of his work and stick them in my journal so that I can refer back to them when I just need a starting point or a little nudge of inspiration. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I use a journal rather than a sketchbook.
If you are new to doodling or doing design sketches, try to use good quality paper. This will allow you to use a range of media. My journal books are not that expensive but do have thick cartridge paper, an expanding pocket at the back – to keep things like postcards in – and have an elastic band which fastens the whole thing together when I’m not using it. It was in my journal book that I doodled the image that I intend to use as a starting point for one of the hangings which I will be making for the Coblynnau project. Although inspired by the River Garw which flows through Bryngarw Country Park , I didn’t want it to be all blue and green. Here in South Wales, we’ve just had the wettest winter on record. We have not got blue and green, we’ve got sludgy grey and muddy brown so these are the colours that I splashed over a piece of paper.
Once the water colour paint had dried, I doodled vertical lines to give the suggestion of trees and added lines of poetry that I thought summed up the mood I wanted to capture. I liked, for example, the words of A C Swinburne
” We thank with brief thanksgiving, whatever gods may be. That no man lives forever, that dead men rise up never; that even the weariest rivier winds somewhere safe to sea.”
A little melancholy perhaps, but I liked the concept of abandoning self determination and accepting that destiny lies with a greater, unseen, unfathomable power. Now all I have to do is try and capture that in a piece of textile art!