Hello! Alexa here, with a confession.
I can't draw. No, truly, I can't. But I have learnt that, for scrapbooking purposes, I can take a line for a walk. Along the way, we can take detours, double back, snake round a bend, loop the loop, and generally behave in an anarchic and silly way. Sometimes we acquire a few friends, like squiggles or spirals or dots along the path for a bit, or pick up a couple of little flowers or leaves en route. You might wonder what on earth you could do with doodles on a layout! I'll have some suggestions in future posts. In the meantime, if you've never tried doodling, then starting with an existing flower stamp can be comforting. Take a stamp which has a clear flowerhead design:
and stamp it with a colour you like onto card. I find the texture of Bazzill too rough for doodling, and prefer a smooth white card. Taking a fine-tipped pen - both the Copic Multi-liners and the Microns give a good clear line - start filling in lines and patterns within the stamped shape. Just dividing a flower petal in half or thirds, for instance, or adding small circles, hearts, stripes, zigzags ... Now comes the fun part; the bit that will transport you back to childhood and a relaxing, aimless, happy feeling of just sitting and, well, colouring in. It doesn't get any more technical than that! Any sort of pen or pencil will do - felt-pens, ordinary colouring pencils, watercolour ones, soft-tipped brush markers, sparkly ones ... just grab a handful and go, like this:
Stamp a few more, and add in a couple of swirls and invented flower shapes. It is of no consequence if nothing is even or identical - irregular is part of the charm. Use a chipboard swirl, or the edge of a saucer to get a curve. Add on some dots in random places, draw a leaf or two. Choose analogous colours (the ones beside each other on the colour wheel) and you can be sure they will go together:
Choosing a shape to draw within makes it feel less scary - all you need to do is fill the space! Take your time, and don't be afraid to experiment. One of the wonderful things is that you can pop the lids on your pens and go and do something else, and return for another five minutes whenever you have time - there's no rush... Have a go at using colours with a strong contrast too:
Use a small plate, or any other circular shape (I found a plastic circular Maths tool in an old pencil-case), and draw a circle. Using the same tool, draw curves within it to represent stems. Make little flowers and leaves sprout along them, and add a few in any spaces. Don't feel you need to colour in every shape - some left black look good too!
There really is nothing more complicated to it than that! And it's a great antidote to the stress of the day. Bored with taking the dog out? Not got one anyway? Raining? Just take a line for a walk instead ...
Alexa followed this post up with some lettering ideas:
Doodling decorative letters, I thought, will be daunting. But I was wrong - it turned out to be a lot simpler than I realised! Here are some of the things I learned, in case they are useful to you too.
It's quite a natural activity - human beings have been doodling, I suspect, ever since someone realised that a stick poked into a fire got some nice black charcoal-y stuff on the end, and you could make marks with it on the nearest stone. Monks in the early Middle Ages liked to use a contrasting colour in their lettering, even in books which were not heavily illuminated but were just the bread-and-butter collections of readings or sermons:
The quickest way to get started? Rule four lines, equal distances apart. Do I measure them? Nope, eyeballing is fine! Choose a softish pencil, and an eraser for rubbing out the lines afterwards:
Then make a few vertical lines, with the ruler if you're feeling anxious, and play around with the shapes. How many varieties of the letter 'A/a' can you make up?
Rectangles and curves with the odd flower growing out the top are easy to do. Here is the first word I ever journalled on a scrapbook page. Because it's on textured Bazzil, with the colouring in done in pencil, close-up it looks chequered:
Even a single letter at the start of a paragraph of journalling can be a way of adding something of yourself to a layout. If you're anxious about spoiling a whole page, could you try it on a tag? Try taking a colouring pencil over the other black lines to for added effect:
One of the easiest ways of adding a doodled feel to letters, is to 'fill in' part of the shapes:
1 Draw an ordinary lowercase 'a' shape.
2 As in 1, then cut off part of the curve with a vertical.
3 Add an extra vertical to an existing one.
4 Cut off part of the curve as well.
5/6 Add little fillers to the ends of the letters.
7/8 Experiment with the vowels: try them oversized, or at an angle, or just normal size
You can mix up lower- and upper-case for a casual effect. Once you've coloured the shapes in the letters, they can look like this:
Just playing around on a piece of A4 will give you lots of ideas - don't be afraid to try anything. All you need to create your own alphabet is to consider: how am I going to do the verticals? and how will I do the curves? Once you have a 'theme' (lines, dots, triangles, stripes, on the letter, inside the letter, outside the letter) just go for it! Here's part of a page I did at the end of a swirls/flowers/patterns class with Maelynn Cheung some years ago:
Her book Doodling for Papercrafters is still available, and I can recommend it. If you are still very anxious about doodling, do each letter on a separate piece of card, trim them, and stick them onto a coloured background - this way, if one of them is 'rubbish', it can be discarded without having to redo the whole word or title. I do hope you\ll get your pencil and pen out and give it a go!
Thank-you for joining us here today!
