While creating Doodle art can be a great way to improve upon your artistic skills, this is not the only benefit it can provide. In fact, that isn’t even the reason that Doodle art was created in the first place.
Doodle art came about sometime in the last decade along with a general movement surrounding the idea of inner peace and meditation. Although there are no steadfast rules that dictate what Doodle art is supposed to look like, there is a trademarked method that states how it is to be created.
The idea behind the method is to create an activity that is meditative and self-reflective. Even contemporary psychologists can see the benefit that this activity can have and some even encourage their clients to engage in this and similar activities.
There are several ways in which this activity is psychologically and even spiritually helpful. For one, it is quite self-soothing. The repetitive nature of these creations allows the creator to “zone out” to an extent during creation. Once the creator chooses a pattern with which to fill in a square, a kind of autopilot takes over and the design almost seems to finish itself. While the creator is seemingly not thinking about their creation, they are given the opportunity to reflect upon their life and events within their life in a way that they may not be able to with out the self-soothing action of drawing simple lines on a piece of paper.
Because Doodles are created in permanent marker and pen, it does not allow for mistakes to be erased or corrected. This is not a bad thing; in fact it has a direct implication in life in general. In life, one makes many mistakes. It is quite easy to fret over these mistakes and become so focused on them that no positive can be found in regards to how they fit into one’s life. Doodle approaches mistakes as inevitability. When you make a mistake while making a Doodle, you are not supposed to just discard your creation and start all over. Instead, your challenge is to figure out how to incorporate that mistake into your work and make it a part of the creation. By doing so, one can learn how to handle mistakes in other areas of life by realizing that these mistakes are not the end of a work, but rather a new and unpredicted part of the art.
But this is not all that we can learn from the process of making Doodles. We can also apply the method of Doodle to the rest of our lives to help reduced stress. This means practicing the art of aimlessness.
In our day-to-day lives, there is so much focus on getting somewhere, being “on the top,” and out-competing our peers that it becomes incredibly nerve-wracking and can cause undue amounts of stress. From the art of Doodle, we can see the benefit of not planning in advance and avoiding the related stress. Similar to walking for stress reduction and meditation, we can simply perform a simple activity with no intent of getting anywhere or out-pacing another person; we simply walk for the enjoyment of walking. This is exactly what the idea behind Doodle art is; drawing simply for the enjoyment of the activity without any worries of the final product or what others may think of what you have done.
