Doodlers anonymous

Posted on: 5th December 2011 in Design Studio Sarah Doodle

Hello. My name is Sarah and I am a doodle addict. There, I’ve said it. Phew! There isn’t a support group for doodlers but there really should be. It is an addiction, a compulsion that is beyond my control (though it’s not as embarrassing as the mild OCD which compels me to repeatedly check I’ve locked the front door, much to the bemusement of my neighbours. “She’s checking the door again, Stuart. She only locked it ten seconds ago.” “She’s mental, poor thing.”) Be warned – if you leave a piece of paper near me, you may get it back covered in meaningless scrawls, scribbles and sketches. I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, most of it will be in pencil (pens don’t last long around here as several other members of staff belong to kleptomaniacs anonymous) so if I’ve drawn penguins, octopi and whales all over your report, at least it’s salvageable. The really bad thing is that I have plenty of nice sketchbooks I could doodle in – lovely, hard-back sketchbooks full of pristine, smooth, white cartridge paper, Moleskeine notebooks full of blank, creamy pages and pads of layout paper, marker paper, Bristol board and every other drawing, sketching, and painting surface you could want. But I don’t want to spoil them by drawing something rubbish, or out of proportion. (Did I mention I’m a bit OCD?) So I doodle on scrap paper (including, if you’re daft enough to leave it lying around, that report of yours) and then, when I draw something I really like, I get annoyed at myself because I’ve done this really nice drawing and it’s on the back of this rubbishy bit of scrap paper. Oh, your report? I haven’t seen it. Do you like this drawing of an owl? I’m quite pleased with it…