Day 3. The Circle Game
Small circles = big feelings
Hello, Friends!
It’s Day 3 of the 30 Days of Drawing, and you are doing great. Ten minutes is totally do(oodle)able, right? In case you were wondering, we stop precisely at 10 minutes for good reason. Often when we’re learning something new or attempting something challenging, we quite early or push ourselves until we become frustrated. Who would want to return the next day and continue to feel frustrated? When we stop at a high point, it leaves us wanting more.
I’m not sure how it is for other creative endeavors, but for drawing, I’ve found ten minutes is just enough time to get into a rhythm, sink into a creative space, and want to keep going. By giving ourselves a hard stop at 10 minutes, when we stop mid-stroke, we want to keep going. And because we want to but we can’t, we look forward to more. And there’s a good chance we’ll come back to it tomorrow. And that, my friends, is how we form a drawing habit.
Alright, our series of abstract (aka DOodle) drawings continues!
Our big lesson on Doodles was yesterday, with a Louise Bourgeois-inspired assignment on Spirals.
For the remainder of Part 1, I’ll send you little bites to inspire and teach you a little something new, then give you your daily abstract-doodle-based assignment. Short and sweet. (Though I might throw a curve ball in there - WATCH OUT.)
For folks who did the 30 days last year, the next couple days will feel familiar. Think of these exercises like sun salutations people do in yoga: you do the same move a bazillion times and every time you learn something new. (Except these exercises won’t lead to you having to get a hip replacement like me later this year, JUST SAYING.) After two days, we veer into all new territory, so get in your reps now and enjoy them while you can.
With that said, let’s go deeper into the abstract doodle drawing with my favorite way to settle my nerves and sync into a drawing space: repetitive drawings and patterns.
The Art of Repetition
Drawing repetitive marks and patterns (like spirals!) helps us pay attention to what is going on INSIDE ourselves. It slows down our breathing, and quiets our minds. It helps us pay attention to our feelings and process them through our bodies. By keeping our hands busy, drawing repetitive marks gives us just enough to do that our brains chatter quiets and we can experience our emotions without distraction. And, the act of drawing itself offers us a concrete outlet for those emotions. Angry? Scribble hard on that paper. Anxious? Breathe out on the downstroke.
Want to sit with your feelings and see how they shift and change with time? Try drawing circles.
Circle Drawings by Hiroyuki Doi
By drawing circles, I feel I’m truly alive and a part of the universe. - Hiroyuki Doi
Our drawing assignment today is one of my favorites, and is inspired by the artist Hiroyuki Doi1. After losing his brother suddenly in 1980, Doi was devastated with grief and unable to move. He wasn’t a trained artist, but he found himself picking up a pen, and only thing he could bring himself to do was draw circles. But once he started drawing circles he couldn’t stop. He said drawing the circles proved him “relief from the sadness and grief” he felt.
Still drawing circles today, Doi creates these detailed compositions with a simple Pilot drawing pen on washi paper. While abstract, they also suggest forms similar to the spirals we were drawing yesterday: organically growing, spinning, moving outwards, like a galaxy or DNA.
One could call Doi’s incredibly detailed drawings intricate, time-consuming doodles, sure. On the other hand, we can also look at them and see evidence of a person processing their most difficult feelings through drawing - through breathing, moving their body, letting their instinct take over. An artful form of meditation. Like a walking meditation, but performed with a pen. (For those of us who want to meditate but have a hard time on the cushion, this might be a practice worth exploring.)
Doi says of his drawing process,
“I feel calm when I’m drawing and I can work for long hours at a stretch. Normally I do not plan a composition in detail. Instead, each picture evolves naturally, spontaneously, and finds its form.”2
In terms of attention, drawing like this, with methodical repetition, helps us focus our attention not only on what we are drawing, but on what it FEELS like to draw - and how we can use drawing as a tool to slow our breathing and calm our nervous system at any time.
Alright, today we’re going to give this a shot. Let’s see how drawing like this evolves for us, what form it takes, and how the process impacts us, inside about out. We’re going to see how it impacts our attention. So grab your supplies and set those timers to 10 minutes…. Instructions, link to the chat, the gallery and more are below for subscribers.