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This iPad doodle looks like a fossil or something caught while ice-fishing. It definitely looks frozen. It makes me think of my American-Norwegian heritage, which prompted the title to this blog–and of Lutefisk–which I tasted once and regretted. Not being a native Norwegian, or speaking its language, koselig was new to me as an idea…

When all else fails, return to basics! This drawing is pretty simple. But it’s also very complex. I was tired of my tightly aligned geometric doodles and needed a vacation. So I just let my stylus wander around as I squirted shapes. First came the head. Then I added a body. The I reworked the…

Native sculptors sometimes talk about “freeing the spirit that occupies a stone.” I suppose I think of my doodles that way. I look for what my random shapes and lines are trying to “tell” me—who they are—and I help bring them into being. I’m kind of like a mid-wife. Below is where I started on…

I am a magician, because I can create illusions. I can do that by varying my intensity (think pencil pressure and gradation). I can make depth happen in a photo by my distribution of darks and lights or in an elegant charcoal drawing by delicate shading. As tone, I make things interesting and give them…

I’m flat. I started as a mark or dot and expanded myself. I’m thought of as much wider than a line. My purpose is to cover area, I’m usually the same boring value throughout, as in the apple above. And, like line–I am foremost a concept. A caution: The perception of me as plane totally…

I started as a mark, a dot or a point, but I stretched myself in one direction and became a line (which is actually just a concept). I am threadlike, thin, and continuous. Sometimes I’m thinner, sometimes I’m thicker, and sometimes I’m both, as I vary how I look. In the above apple, I use…

So, we have just talked about ideas being infinite, but now you’ve got a blank page or screen in front of you and don’t feel the smallest inkling of an idea. How can that be if ideas are infinite? The simple answer is stage fright–the “fight or flight” response–the specter of “put up or shut…

Assume no restraints, no budget, or time limitations. Vow “I dare to be bad”–you have permission to make mistakes, lots of them. Oscar Wilde, a writer had this to say: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Are you hesitant to jump in? Here’s a quote from Isamu Noguchi,…

Above is my cookie sheet after baking a couple of juicy pies. This would be referred to as found art. Next is a legitimate abstract created on iPad with Apple Pencil–no planning. This is a carefully planned abstract composition with shapes and lines carefully plotted out and related to each other. There is no purpose…

This image is a not as precise as most of my geometric doodles look, but I really like how it came out. I experiment with an app called iColorama, which is much like a forerunner to AI, since it offers a large selection of effects created by algorithms–which can be cranked up or down in…

I liked the French version of this doodle for a title. I was listening to an audio book about future happenings, while I doodled on my iPad. This robot showed up as my subject. It looked like he was out for a walk and sat on a rail fence to enjoy nature. Then along came…

This painting is from the archive of my traditional art. It is not digital, and did not come from a doodle. It is acrylic on Gesso, on illustration board–inspired by a house with antique furniture, where I lived for a while. That fireplace was not a fireplace. It was an old storage cupboard of some…

Think of all the different traditional media that might be best for your idea. It will give it an entirely new slant, guaranteed! It could be a rubber stamp, a linoleum print, a collage, a black and white drawing, a stippled ink approach, a swishy watercolor, a charcoal drawing, a paper sculpture, a clay creation,…

And they brought more friends. They all enjoyed themselves very much, sipping tea and eating fresh baked scones with raspberry jam. As they caught up on their different stories, they all agreed that Mr. Potato Head was a jolly good host, and they should all do this again, sometime.

This is a mini lesson on shape. Think of your subject as forced into a shape. A circle, triangle, and square are like the primary colors. It’s where you start. Everything else is a variation on those three basic shapes.

On this one, my stylus and I were at a crossroads. The stylus wanted to do a duck standing in a pond, and I wanted to do a chicken. So we drew straws and I won. I let it leave the blue lines where it had intended to put the pond, but I insisted on…

There is a Sci-Fi fan in the house, so I have been exposed to a lot of Sci-fi characters. Skippy is from the Craig Alanson book series “Expeditionary Force”. According to audio description, he is a beer-can size advanced AI with a sassy delivery. He sneaked into my iPad the other day and preceded to…

I keep a digital sketchbook of abandoned doodles. One day, I was poking through its pages and ran across an image which at first, looked like an abstract mouse head. But, as I turned it upside down, I found a cat lurking in the shapes–so I got out my Apple Pencil and played with it.…

The last blog addressed general arts. This post is more specific to the visual arts. Recently, there was a news item about an astounding bid for a banana secured to a gallery wall with duct tape. It took place at New York’s Sotheby’s Auction House and the winning bid was for 6.2 million. (This piece…

Art is like soul. It is who you are. Your attitudes, likes and dislikes all come intoplay. You can find art in a good golf swing, or a beautiful math formula, or an exquisite cuisine. To some, the arts are like a “product”–something with a beginning and conclusion, created for an audience to consume–such as…

Every so often, I will relax and just paint on top of photos. It’s mindless. However, it can produce subtle and sometimes startling, results. I like the flatness it produces as it turns 3D space into 2D space. Above is a recent example of that “brush play”.” I use photos captured from Unsplash and Pixabay.…

First came Wiggly Man. Then he cleaned up his act and acquired a hat and umbrella.

A croak and a roar popped out of my iPad last night. The croak came first, in the spirit of a rather complex, geometric-looking frog. The roar came second. I think he was complaining about all the time the frog took to materialize. The lion was quite simple. Below is the framework that imagined the…

That thought occurred to me as I struggled with the incoming storm surge of yet another technical evolution. There are really no answers to all the questions. It will rain on some parades, and not on others. It’s like Alice’s deck of cards in Alice in Wonderland. It will mean to us whatever it will…

One day there was not a thought in mind, but randomness. I looked at the mess confronting me and faces began to look out. The style called “Expressionism” floated through thought channels. An arrangement of faces began to unfold itself. I liked the image above, but found that a different selection of colors gave it…

I like to abstract and stylize, but I have to admit, it was very satisfying to doodle through this normal scene, as I played with Procreate brushes. It was done in stages. I did some work on it, and then some more work, and the third time out, it finally arrived where I wanted it…

The doodle portrait below was the inspiration for “Wall Street Gothic”–a parody on Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” I tend to think of Illustrations as cleaned up doodles–they go through a messy stage as detail is added and erased, but as the polishing process continues, a finished illustration eventually emerges. For the initial doodle (below), I…

Yesterday, I ran across a photo of a woman whose head was tilted at an interesting angle. It gave her a sense of  intrigue, and I traced her features to understand that expression better. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, I just liked the position of her head and hand. As I…

I had finished developing some geometric shapes into a compact design and was in the midst of rotating my iPad, when I saw him. A bulbous, snorting nose. At first he defied finishing him off nicely. But I kept prodding him with my Apple Pencil, filling in negative and positive spaces, and fencing him in…

I try for different digital styles when I doodle. A designer might refer to that approach as “variations on a theme.” Personally, I think of it as visual adventure, since I just plunge in and let it take me where it will. The “Man with a Tea Kettle,” above, is one of my favorites. Below…

Says the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. And the best thing to do with tea is to let it steep. It’s the same with a hot new idea. As it steeps, it becomes more refined. And like tea, some ideas need to steep a little longer than others. (With this teapot doodle,…