Day 276 - Doodle

 DOODLE

Prompt - Doodle : Spend some time today doodling for about 5-10 minutes.  Write about the thoughts you had while doodling, or create something inspired by your finished doodle.

My doodling invariably becomes colouring in, if I have more than one colour of pen available, or shading in if not.  I like to see what patterns turn up from drawing a few lines on a page, then move on into becoming something more visually interesting.  And today I did that again, after a gap of - I don't know how long.  But that simple act took me back to when I was more prolific in producing this kind of visual decoration.

It was a habit to do something like this to boost my mood when I was bored at work.  And, for several years, it was a daily habit in the paper diaries I used to keep.  There were several variations of this.  Some of these volumes, A4 in size, had several of these designs in them.  

Many were like the picture I drew today, with swirling lines intersecting and creating strangely shaped and variously sized spaces.  These would then be coloured in, usually with solid colours, in a far more meticulous and time consuming process than that I've done today.  They would be completed gradually over the course of the year.  

But the most interesting ones were the 'date snakes'.  On the first of January I would create a small outline shape, at random on the page.  Then it would be filled in with some colour or colours, and the number 1.  The following day another shape would be drawn to adjoin the first one, this time with contrasting colour and the number 2.  And so on, all the way to 365.  The challenge was to get the snake to near enough fill the A4 page on the final day of the year, so the 'snake' had to wend it's way carefully, not get blocked or snarled up within itself, so that it filled the space at the right time, and not before.  The shapes would vary in size and detail, usually getting a bit larger once I hit three figures, and again at two hundred.

A lost art, to me at least, for my diaries are all online nowadays, have been for several years.  The date snake would never get started, let alone completed.  And I think I already have enough daily challenges with my 11k steps, 750 words and 365 writing!  But todays' exercise reminded me of those times, and how lovely some of the end products were.  Maybe colour means more to me than I realise...