Doodle Art: Curvy and Organic Designs

1. Welcome!: Hi, I'm Karen. In this class we're going to be making curvy, organic, and flowing doodle art. This class is suitable for everyone, including absolute beginners. I've been doodling almost every day since 2015. Doodling gave me the courage to pick up the pen and make my mark on paper. Through doodling, I could be creative, relax, try out new tools and new ideas. Doodling is intuitive and easy, but the creations you can make are limitless. In this class, I'll cover the tools you need. Basically all you need is a pen and paper. Then we'll practice some basic curvy doodle designs, circles, ovals, dots, scallops, leaves, ropes, outlines and bills. We will embellish these designs to make them more elaborate and interesting. Then will create more complex designs by combining these shapes. Finally, will make a large organic, curvy, and flowing doodle using the designs we learned in class. It's really easy and a lot of fun, it's even addictive. You can follow along with the design I make or go on your own creative tangent and see where doodling takes you. I can't wait to see your creations. Let's get started. 2. Supplies: For this class, you don't need any fancy supplies, just depend, and some paper. I recommend using an archival ink, fineliner pen, but you can use any type of pen that works for you. Some great brands of fineliner pens are sakura pigma micron, potentate, faber-castell, and copic. These pens come in various widths are sizes. I typically like to use the 08 size or the M, which stands for medium size. But you might like to experiment with finer or broader pens. The reason I recommend archival ink fineliner pens for doodling is because they have very dark black ink and they create a nice crisp, consistent line and they're odorless as opposed to alcohol-based markers like sharpies. Many pens will work for doodling, so you can experiment with what you have and see what you love using most. I loved doodling with technical pens, fountain pens, gel pens, deep pens, and even paint markers. But if you're just starting out and not sure which pen to choose, my recommendation would be to use an archival ink fineliner pen. For paper, you can really use anything; a notebook, a sketchbook, printer paper, card stock, or even scrap paper will work great. For my finished drawings, I sometimes use bristol board, because it's very bright white and it's very dense and smooth. But for starting out and for practice, I would definitely recommend using less expensive paper. Grab your tools and let's get started. 3. Circles, Ovals, Dots: In this lesson, we're going to draw all sorts of doodle designs based on circles, ovals and dots. You can use this page from the class worksheet PDF, or you can just use a blank sheet of paper and draw a few rectangles on it if you prefer. In this first rectangle, let's draw some circles and pack them next to each other to fill the space. I'm trying not to arrange the circles along straight lines or a grid, so that they'll look more chaotic and organic. But lining them up could also work. In the next rectangle, let's draw the same thing, but instead of circles, let's use ovals. It's interesting to see how just using a slightly different shape gives it a different look. These remind me of pebbles or beings. Now, let's try drawing narrow, elongated ovals with space between them, and arrange them like a brick wall. Let's try packing a bunch of circles like we did in the first rectangle, but this time we'll vary the size of the circles. We'll use big ones, medium ones and even tiny ones. This reminds me a lot of soap bubbles. Let's fill this rectangle with a bunch of dots. I like to pack them one next to the other. That way I assure that the dots don't touch each other and don't cluster together. But it's up to you how you like to arrange the dots. It'll just end up looking slightly different. Now, let's do something really simple. Let's draw a line of circles, like a string of pearls, meandering along the space. This next design is similar to the first one we did, except we're going to space out the circles. Here, we'll draw some ovals standing next to each other in a line. Now, some ovals that are slanted. So far, we've filled nine squares using ovals, dots and circles. You can see how even though we're using very simple shapes, were getting all sorts of different organic looking patterns. What we're going to do next, is look at the patterns we've already created, and try to add some interest either to the circles or to the negative space around them. In this first example, let's take the first pattern we drew and just fill in the background in black. Rather than circle outlines, this one looks more like white circles against a black background. Now, let's draw that string of pearls again, and just add a dot inside each circle. In this next one, let's accentuate the background by adding stripes behind the ovals. It's really interesting to see how the oval suddenly pop against this background. This next pattern I like to use a lot. Let's fill in the circles in black, and then fill in the remaining white space with dots. These are some ideas I've come up with. I encourage you to try to come up with more patterns of your own. You can see how making slight variations to simple shapes results in interesting looking patterns that are each unique. Having a variety of patterns to choose from when you doodle, is really useful. That way, you never get bored and your drawings end up looking more complex and elaborate. Let's move along to this bottom rectangle on the page, and try to think of all sorts of ways to decorate a circle. Let's draw a few circles and see how many different patterns we can make by using lines, dots, filling in the circles and combining designs. These circles can later appear in our doodles on their own, or they can be packed and arranged on the page, just like the patterns we drew at the beginning of the lesson. Let's draw a few decorated ovals as well. Finally, let's choose one of the circles or ovals. I'll take this one. Let's also choose one of the patterns from before, and fill in a rectangle using these designs combined. You can see that the possibilities are endless and we've only just started. Take a photo of the practice sheet you filled in so far, and upload it to your project down below. In the next lesson, we'll move on to drawing scallops. 4. Scallops: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at scallops and see what kind of different designs and character we can give them and how we can use them in various ways. Let's start off with what I would consider the basic definition of a scallop. It's like a line that hops along another line. Scallops are very decorative and they can also flow from one place to another and lead the eye in really interesting ways. It's really easy to give scallops a different character by either making them more flat and elongated, or by making them very tall and skinny. You can play around with different variations of how tall and how wide your scallops are. I also sometimes like to space out my scallops. I think it gives them a different look in the overall composition. Here's another way to incorporate scallops. Basically, instead of the scallops jumping on the line, we have a line that has a bump. This one is really fun to do. It's like the outline of a cloud, when you draw like a cartoonish cloud. It's a little bit more whimsical and fun. Here, I'd like to demonstrate how you can fill a space using scallops. I'm laying down one line of scallops like we did in the first example, and then I am packing scallops on top of that in a staggered fashion, so that the line is hopping on top of the scallops that were in the row beneath it. You can keep going to fill as much space as you'd like. This is one where the scallops detached from each other and go their separate ways. For this you're going to need like a ceiling, and then one of the scallops is facing down and the other one is facing up. Now, let's experiment with embellishing and decorating our scallops. I'm drawing these scallops a little bit larger so that I'll have space inside of them to decorate them. What I'm doing is just filling them in with smaller and smaller upside down u shapes. Another really simple way to give scallops a different character is to have them filled in with black. Here, let's use the flatter elongated scallops and add some stripes to make the eye see that the scallop is an object against the background rather than just an outline. Finally, I add stripe to some scallops that are spaced apart. Here, let's do a cloudy shape and fill it in with dots. Whenever we fill in an area using black, stripes, dots or any other design, we're creating variation in the doodle in terms of value as well. It's as if we're adding white, light gray, darker gray, black, and making the doodle more interesting and intricate. Here, let's use the detached scallops pattern, and add some stripes in the background. See how the scallops pop against the background a lot more this way. Also, the stripes give a darker value to the negative space. The background seems to be a gray when you look at it at a glance. This is another very simple and yet dramatic way to embellish scallops, is by adding a roof above the line of scallops and filling the negative space in black. Finally, I'm going to use those lines with bumps and fill in just a little tiny half circle inside each. Let's move on to the bigger squares. What we want to do here is to experiment with embellishing or decorating larger scallops. The benefits of a larger scallop are that there's a lot more space to allow you to create more elaborate designs inside of the scallop. You can experiment with having all sorts of designs along each of these roads inside of the scallop. These are really just a few examples and the possibilities are endless. Having all these slight variations will really help your doodle be more complex and unique, and also for you as the person who was doodling, it won't feel as repetitive. It'll feel like every time you're doing something a little bit new, a little bit different. For me at least, that's what allows me to doodle for hours and hours and hours, because I get to switch it up as I move along. You can see that the larger the scallop, the more you can give it a unique character. When it's released small, there's not a lot of room to fit in any elaborate design. I encourage you to try out these patterns and also try out some variations of your own. Take a photo of your scallops worksheet after you've filled it in, and upload it to your project down below, I'd love to see it. Let's move on to leaves. 5. Leaves: In this lesson, we'll practice drawing leaves and we'll see what variations we can do with this basic shape. The basic leaf shape is like an oval with two pointing sides to it. We can vary this shape by making it wider and also by making it more elongated and narrow. We can also draw a leaf more organically by having its edges more curvy and wavy. Let's draw really tiny leaves and use them in order to fill a bit of the space. This reminds me a little bit of seeds. When you use this layout on the page, you can have the seeds flowing in different directions. You can also tightly pack the seeds together. When you do this, you can also have the leaves flowing in different directions. We'll practice that in a little bit. The leaf shape can be contained between two lines. In this case I drew two parallel lines, but the lines don't have to be parallel. This allows the leaf shape to flow and fill in all spaces in your doodle. You can also have these seeds radiate from a central point. This looks a little bit like a flower. You can have this growing larger and larger as much as you like. In this bottom rectangle, let's decorate our leaves and see what kind of embellishments and details we can add inside the leaf outline or outside of it to make it more interesting. This is what I considered to be the basic leaf design. Let's draw a line across the center and then diagonal lines on each side. I don't really bother to match up the diagonal lines on each side, but if you prefer, you can also match them up. When you have a very narrow leaf, usually it's enough to just have that one long line along the center of the leaf. You could also decorate each side of the leaf differently. In this case, let's draw diagonal lines across one side and fill in the other side of the leaf to give it a different character. The leaf shape can also double up as a football shape depending on how you decorate the inside of it. You don't have to have that line across the center in this example, let's just fill in a little seed inside of the leaf. We could also fill in the leaf using dots. Now let's try to fill in the negative space. Let's draw two parallel lines and some leaves that are contained between those two lines. In this case, let's fill in the negative space using dots. But you could also fill in the negative space using solid black or stripes or whatever comes to mind. I encourage you to experiment and see what variations you can come up with. Here let's do a second example where we have a wide strip as if it's going behind the leaves.. You can see that each of these variations does give a different character to the doodle designs. When you draw seeds, you can fill them in with black and you can see how they look different as opposed to just an outline. Another thing you could do is fill in the negative space in black. It looks like you have these white packed seeds against the black background. This really allows you to add more drama to your doodle so that it doesn't look like a bunch of jumbled lines. You also have sections of black and white shapes rather than just lines. When your leaf is big enough, you can embellish each of these stripes inside of the leaf. There are many ways you can do this, similar to what we did with the scallops. Be sure to experiment with bigger leaves as well. In this bottom part of the page, I wanted to show you how you can have your leaves or your seeds flowing in a certain direction. There are many ways this can be done, but this is just one example. Since the leaves have a direction because they're elongated, you can lay them out across the space anyway you like. Maybe in a really big arc, or in a circle, or in the way I did here, which is like an organic s-shape. They seem to be going somewhere. This creates a lot of interest and movement in your doodle. I encourage you to keep practicing, try different designs of your own, see which designs speak to you more. In the next lesson, we'll move onto ropes. 6. Ropes: In this lesson, we'll practice what I like to call ropes and my boyfriend likes to call them snakes and you might have a different name for them. Let me know if you think of a better name. Essentially, a rope is a shape that extends from one place to another. It can be straight, it can be curvy, it can be wide, it can be narrow. Let's experiment a little bit with different kinds of ropes. Starting off with a basic rope, let's draw a wavy line and then a line that's more or less parallel to that first line. You can also make the rope wider and this will allow you to embellish it in different ways. You'll have more space inside the rope to add interesting embellishments. Another really cool thing you can do with ropes is to have them become narrow and then wide, and back to narrow. This makes your doodle a lot more interesting and dynamic, because the designs inside of the rope will become smaller and larger as you move along the narrower and wider parts of the rope, and we'll practice that down below in a minute. You can also have the rope looping around itself. This adds a little bit of a quirky element and it's really fun to do as well. In this bottom rectangle on the page, let's experiment just as we did in the previous lessons with embellishing our ropes. Starting off with the slimmer rope, where we're going to space out some stripes along the rope and fill in between every other two stripes, to get this sort of black and white pattern. Another classic way for me to embellish a rope is just to have these spaced out stripes, which makes the rope look a little bit like a ladder. Let's try a wider rope. Since it's wider, we have more space inside of it to embellish it with a little bit more detail. In this case, I'm going to draw some stripes and some rectangles contained between those stripes. You can see that this has a really strong effect and it looks different from the narrower ropes. Even though it might seem that, oh, it's all the same, whether it's narrow or wide, it really isn't. When you vary your designs in this way, even though these are very simple variations, you're getting so much more interest and complexity in your doodles. In this next example, let's embellish the rope with alternating dots and filled in squares. Here let's add some stripes along a wider rope. Let's fill in a random stripe here and there. I'm not trying to have the pattern repeat itself exactly, just choosing a random square and filling it in. Now let's do something really fun. Let's draw a rope that goes from narrow, to wide to narrow again, and fill in the space inside of the rope without touching the lines of the rope, using rectangles. This is what I meant when I said before that. When you use a rope that goes from narrow, to wide to narrow again, and you have a pattern inside of this rope, the pattern morphs. It goes from small to wide and I find it really interesting and appealing to look at, especially when it's a bold design like this. You could also experiment with zigzag pattern inside of your rope. Let's draw a rope that's basically three lines, not just two lines. One thing I like to do is to make diagonal lines in one rope, and then diagonal lines in the other direction on the other rope. This ends up looking a little bit like a braid. You could also take this further. In this case, we're going to draw six lines. I know it can be a little bit hard to have the lines parallel, so just go at your own pace and don't be bothered so much if the lines touch, or if they're not exactly parallel to each other. That's totally fine. In each of these paths on the rope, you can have different designs. In this case, I chose to have the designs symmetric along the center. I have the same designs on the outermost paths and then the same design on the next path, so that my mega rope is still symmetric. But you can experiment with so many elaborations on this theme. We're barely scratching the surface with what you can do with the ropes. Ropes are an amazing element to add to your doodle and we will see that in the lesson where we meld everything together. Ropes really help you have a flow and break up the space. We'll talk about that in an upcoming lesson. I do encourage you to experiment with all types of ropes and all types of embellishments. See what speaks to you. Have fun with it. After you're done with this worksheet, please upload it to your project section down below. I would love to see it. In the next lesson we're going to talk about something I like to call outlines and blankets. 7. Outlines & Fills: In this lesson, we'll work on drawing what I like to call outlines and fills. Sometimes like called fills, blankets. So if I say blankets or fills, I mean the same thing. So in this first square, let's draw a couple of scallops. The idea of an outline is very simple just to outline the scallop shapes. Even if the scallops are going around a corner in an L-shape, you can also outline them to add a bit more interest to the scallops and also give them like a white padding from the rest of the space that will be filled in with doodles. We can also add an outline to scallops that are spaced apart, for example, like this. Now let's try what I like to call fills or blankets. Let's draw those same three scallops and what I mean by a fill is imagine all of the pointy little places in the negative space around these scallops, so it's like I'm throwing a blanket over these scallops and filling in the space between that line and the scallops. This way what I'm doing is smoothing out all of the pointy parts and also adding some drama because of the black of the fill. Another way to throw a blanket over your scallops is not to have it slide all the way onto the line, but have it perpendicular to the line. So just like this, it looks a little bit different and it gives you another tool to add some variety to your doodles. You can also do the same thing with scallops that are aligned along an L-shape or a corner just by having the line hover over them and then filling in the space in between the line and the scallops. Sometimes what this does is group together the scallops as an object rather than have them mix too tightly with the rest of your doodle. It adds like a pause between these shapes and the shapes that are going to be drawn on top of them. Here let's try a blanket over these spaced apart scallops. It's the same principle, it just gives you a way to accentuate your drawings and to give you a nice clean line without any bumps to doodle on top of. You can see how the outlines and the blankets or fills give you a different look. They're not exactly shapes on their own like scallops or circles or ovals or leaves, but outlines and fills are a really great element to add to your doodle. And the more complex or doodle is, the more that these elements will be able to take your doodle to the next level and have it looking a bit more interesting and varied. Here let's try a leaf shape and add an outline around it, and here are three leaves spaced apart and we can just add an outline that covers all of these leaves. Without the outline, they were more separate shapes and what the outline did was group them together. We can also outline a bunch of circles. Even these ovals which are spaced apart can be outlined and once you outline them, they look like one object or one group. We can also outline ropes, and this gives them a little bit more of an emphasis and a bit of a separation between the rope and the rest of your doodle. Now let's try similar objects but using blankets or fills. If for example we try these three leaves, then by drawing a line around them, we're getting rid of all of the pointy parts of the leaves and we're left with a nice smooth line on top of which we can continue our doodle and it also accentuates the leaves because of the strong black fill around them. We can do the same thing with a bunch of circles, and the same thing with ovals that are spaced apart. We can decide how tightly we want this line to follow the shapes that are contained inside of it. We can have the line really tight around the shapes are more loose and covering a larger area. It's all up to you and what you feel like doodling at that moment. Let's try a curvy rope which loops around itself, and let's use fills here to get rid of the pointy parts of the rope. Wherever we have a pointy edge inside the rope, we can just cover it up with a blanket and fill that in. This is another way to add interest to your doodles rather than adding more motifs like leaves and circles, etc. This is another way to embellish an existing motif or doodle design. You can see that it adds a different character to this rope. You can imagine that it would be easy to further doodle on top of this rope after it's been smoothed out rather than how it was before it was smoothed out using the blanket or fill. Let's take that same loopy rope more or less and add an outline around it. Basically I'm looking up this rope as if it's a finished object and then just outlining the whole rope. It looks a little bit different because the outline starts by outlining one part of the rope then the outline goes around the loop, so the outline doesn't exactly follow the rope the way it was drawn. It's interesting. It also makes it look a little bit like a cutout. Once you continue your doodle and doodle around this rope, it will make the rope look like it's popping out of the page because it's outlined with this white space. I'm just going to fill in the rope with a design so that it would be easier to see the rope against the outline. When the rope was just blank inside, you could hardly tell the difference between the rope and the outline. But now it's easier to differentiate where the rope is and where the outline is. When you outline anything, you don't have to leave the outline blank. Here, for example, we can add some stripes inside of our outline, or we can fill it in completely with black and you can take this in any direction you want and add any type of design inside of your outline. So far we've just outlined more or less individual shapes. So we outline a bunch of scallops or we outlined a leaf, or we outlined the rope. But let's say you've doodled some scallops and then next to them you doodled some circles, then when you decide to outline the shapes that you have, you treat everything like one shapes. So when we want to outline what we've doodled so far here, we simply start by outlining the scallops and then continue seamlessly to outline the circles. What that does for us is group them together. We can do the exact same thing with a blanket or a fill, just have the blanket cover, both of these objects as if they were one. In this final example, let's draw a bunch of scallops and a rope next to them or a rope coming out from behind them, and then add a blanket or a fill that covers up all of the pointy parts between the scallops and the rope itself. It gives it a different character. I hope you're starting to see that outlines and blankets or fills are very useful tool to add more interests to your doodles and to separate some of the objects you've drawn so far from the objects you're about to draw or the doodle designs are about to add on top of them. Be sure to take a photo of the doodles you practiced in this lesson, you're welcome to practice all designs you don't have to do just the ones that I showed here, and upload them to your Project Section, and let's continue on to combinations. 8. Combinations: So far we've experimented with making all variations on these basic shapes of circles, dots, ovals, scallops, leaves, ropes. We also experimented with outlines and fills. I really hope you enjoyed making those variations as much as I do. Now, we're going to have even more fun combining these shapes together. There are so many ways to combine these shapes together. In this lesson, we're going to touch upon a few examples. I hope this will get your creative juices flowing and you'll be inspired to try a ton of different variations that you'll come up with on your own. Let's get started. What I mean by combinations is to take these elements and put them together in interesting ways. For example, let's start with combining circles with circles and dots. Let's draw a large circle and then surround this circle with smaller circles and add some dots inside those circles and then fill in some circles inside of the circle. Even though we're still in the domain of circles and dots, this is a little bit more complex than what we did in the circles lesson. You can see how you can take this further and further by adding more layers of circles around the circle and arranging the circles in different ways as well. Now, let's do something similar of combining scallops with scallops. Let's draw a couple of scallops spaced apart and then decorate the outline of those scallops using scallops. We can also add a half circle that's filled in inside of those scallops, just to give them a little bit more character and decorate them. Next, let's try to combine ropes and ovals. What we'll do here is to draw one of those ropes that change their shape from narrow to wide to narrow again and then let's fill in this rope using ovals so that the ovals are contained between the two lines of the rope. What this does is it stretches the ovals and elongates them when the rope is wider and it smashes them and makes the ovals small when the lines are narrower. This gives the rope more of a dynamic look. The ovals tilt sideways since the rope is tilting sideways as well. To make this pop even more, let's fill in the background with black. I think this creates a really striking design in your overall composition as we will try later on to incorporate these designs in a larger doodle. Finally, let's add an outline around this rope. Try to think about each of these designs before we added the next step and see if you think that the next step improve the design. If it did, try to experiment on your own, adding more and more designs. In this next example, let's try a rope that has three paths inside of it. Decorate the inside of this rope using some design. I chose to use these blocks of black and white and then some stripes in the center, but you can choose whichever you'd like to try this time. Then let's decorate the outline of the rope using scallops that are connected together like that line with the bumps, which you can start to see here is that even though in the scallops lesson, we had this scallops along a straight line. Here, we can have the scallop running along any line we want. In this case, the line is curvy. That's cool if the scallops can follow a curvy line, and this gives the doodle more flow and it makes them more organic and fun. For our finishing touch, let's add two dots inside each of our scallops. You can see that in this example, we combined ropes with scallops and dots, as well as embellishing the inside of the rope. We're slowly building it up. We're starting with the really simple shapes, embellishing them, and then combining them together to create an infinite range of possibilities. In this example, let's use a wide rope and embellish it with some leaves. They're very small. Just use three dots to embellish the inside of the leaf because there isn't a lot of space inside of them. Let's add a strip of black in the negative space of the rope behind the leaves. It looks as if it's behind the leaves. We could also decorate the white space that's left over above and below the strip of black using these three tiny little marks and then let's add some scallops running along the outer edges of the rope and fill them in with black and then outline those scallops. You can see here that we're combining ropes with leaves, with dots, with scallops, with outlines. This is just one of a countless number of ways to combine these particular shapes. I want you to take a look at the impact that the blocked in areas of black have and the impact that you get when you outline a blocked in area of black. In this next example, let's draw a classic leaf design and outline it twice. We're basically outlining the outline. Then we can embellish the outer outline with scallops that are filled in with black. Finally, outline those scallops. In a way, we use the same outlined scallops that we did in the previous example, but this has a totally different look since it's not along a rope, it's actually around a leaf. It's contained in this oval shape rather than a long strip. We have some space left over in this rectangle. Let's try a different leaf and fill this leaf in with circles that are packed closely together. Then fill in the negative space leftover in the leaf with black. Finally, we can outline this leaf and add some stripes inside the outline. You can see how this leaf and the leaf next to it look totally different even though they're both using leaves and outlines. Now, let's try a bunch of larger scallops. In this case, I chose to add some stripes inside of them, some vertical stripes and then add some circles along the outer edge of this range of scallops. Add a roof above the circles in order to be able to fill in the negative space in black. When there's an area filled in with black, it adds a little bit more drama and also there's this juxtaposition of just the stripes, which are basically just lines as opposed to the blocked in areas which look like white shape against a black background. In this next example, let's try even larger scallops. It's so large that we can contain a lot of detail inside of it. I'm going to fit in a couple of leaves that are spaced apart inside the scallop. The size of the leaf is determined according to how much height I have in that area of the scallop. That gives it a bit of a more organic flowy look. I chose to add a seed darkened inside of each leaf, but you can definitely choose whichever design you want to put inside the leaf. Then I added some stripes in the negative space leftover in the scallops, but the stripes aren't touching the leaves. You can definitely have them touching, but this is what I felt like doing at that particular moment. Try to see what attracts you and what you feel like drawing at that particular moment. I promise you it's going to look awesome no matter what you choose. Now, let's embellish the outside of the scallops. We can start by outlining it and outlining it again and embellishing the outer outline using these blocks of black and embellish that outline using some spaced apart scallops with two dots inside of them and finally outlining these outer scallops. We're getting a completely customized, one of a kind, huge scallop. I just want you to imagine what you could do with these elements and imagine what a huge variety you can get if you keep going and keep varying your doodles, even using these basic shapes that we practiced in this class so far. Obviously, if you add more basic shapes and you think of more types of designs, you're making an even larger variety of options available to you. In this next example, I'm going to use a shape that I like to call feathers. It's the outside of a scallop with the inside of a classic leaf. I'm spacing them apart. What I want to show you is another way to pack scallops in space. If your scallops are tall here, and there are also spaced apart, you can pack the next row of scallops in between the scallops. Hopping between one scallop and the next and you can keep going to fill up more and more space. This really does remind me of how feathers are laid out on a bird's wing, for example. Obviously, it's a very graphic representation and you can decorate the inside of the scallops anyway you like. You can keep repeating the leaf pattern or you can switch it up. There are really a ton of variations you could do on this basic theme. In this next example, let's draw another large scallop and instead of outlining from the outside, I'm going to outline it from the inside. Instead of having scallops along the outer line, let's have scallops going along the inner line. I'm going to decorate these scallops using three dots each. Since this doodle so far is looking a little bit like a bunch of outlines without any blocked in areas of black, I chose to add two stripes to the inside of this scallop where we haven't decorated it yet and fill in some areas in black. Try to see how these areas of black make you feel, how they make the rest of the doodle pop. In the leftover space, let's line up a bunch of leaves. I chose to fill each leaf using horizontal stripes. Finally, for a festive touch I added some darkened circles around the outer perimeter of this scallop. Consider how the doodle that you've created makes you feel and also consider how you felt as you were doodling it. Sometimes there are things I love to look at, but for me they're tedious to doodle. I try to steer towards the things that I really enjoy doodling. In this last example, let's draw a rope that looks a little bit like a braid. This rope has two paths in it. One path has diagonal stripes one way, the other path has diagonal stripes the other way. What this did for us is it's split up the space to two parts. In the upper part of the space, we're going to pack a bunch of leaves next to each other, spaced apart because the space goes from wide to narrow, the leaves also go from wide to narrow, and that gives it this organic flowing look. I choose to decorate the leaves in the classic leaf decoration and I wanted to outline these leaves so that they'll pop against this background that I have planned for them. Now, let's add a starry night behind these leaves. Let's just draw a bunch of circles. Some of these circles seem to be going behind the outline of the leaf and then I fill in the negative space behind those circles in black, which really makes these leaves pop forward as if the leaves are suspended in space. I'll stop here, but you guys are welcome to keep going. You can make squares of any size you like or just use a blank sheet of paper or use this worksheet page, just print it out again and experiment with all combinations. See what speaks to you, see what you feel is enjoyable for you to draw and to doodle. In the next lesson, we are going to take everything we've done so far and meld it altogether in a larger doodle. 9. Melding It All Together: In this lesson, we'll bring together all of the elements that we practiced so far and melt them all into one large organic doodle. You can practice doing this in this worksheet in the PDF supplied with this class, I'm going to demonstrate in this sketchbook. Choose a rectangle size that isn't too intimidating for you. Sometimes I like to draw a border around the page, it just gives me a place to anchor my doodle elements rather than having my pen fall off of the page. But you don't have to do this if you don't want to. Sometimes I use a ruler, but oftentimes I just free hand the border and I'm not really bothered about the quirky, wonky lines. You might be able to see that I smeared some ink in the middle of this page, but that's not a problem, we can easily cover it up as we're doodling. You'll see this a little bit later on. When you're just starting a new doodle, it can be intimidating to look at a blank page and not know where to start. One really great tool to start is to use a rope, choose whichever style of rope you'd like to draw. It doesn't matter what style of rope you choose to draw because they're going to be so many more doodle elements in this page that there is no one element that makes or breaks your doodle. Feel free to just choose whichever rope comes to mind. If you're having trouble coming up with the doodle designs just from the top of your head, have your worksheets that you filled in in the previous lessons next to you and refer to them so that you can pull elements from those worksheets. I've chosen to decorate the inside of this rope using triangular patterns and then some filled in triangles. But feel free to use whichever declaration or design you'd like to use for your rope. What this rope did for us is it broke up this space. It got us going, we're started and it broke up the space into two smaller empty spaces. Another great element to use for biting off a chunk of the empty space and filling it with a doodle is a large scallop. A large scallop fits in very nicely in corners. Once you carve out that space for the scallop, you're left with a much more manageable space inside the scallop. Remember what we did in the combinations lesson, where we practiced embellishing and decorating a scallop in a lot of ways. Feel free to decorate the inside of your scallops in any way you like. I personally don't plan the decorations that I'm about to add to my scallop, I just come up with them as I go along. You can choose a design that's more symmetric and regular, or you can do something similar to what I'm doing here, where my scallop is not symmetric on the inside, it's just filled with all random doodle designs. Again, refer to the worksheets that you've filled in so far to pull out ideas in case you're feeling stuck and unsure how to decorate your scallop. Now that we have this rope and this scallop, the pages looking a little bit nicer and more interesting and we can keep going from here. At this point, I decided I would add another rope. This time it's a slim rope with some stripy design in it. After that, I anchored another rope between the two ropes that I have so far. Again, what this did for me was it curved out a little manageable chunk of space on the page that I can fill with all designs like we did in the combinations lesson. In this case, I decided to embellish the space with leaves and then chose whichever design came to mind to embellish the negative space behind the leaves. It really doesn't matter what design you choose, because what matters is the whole page filled with lots of lines and dots and scallops and filled in blocks rather than just one specific doodle element in the page. You can see how so far I've mixed it up a little bit between just drawing lines and also filling in spaces with black. What that does is it breaks the monotony of just seeing lines and it also, if you remember, when we talked about value, it adds some areas of darker values and lighter values which compliment each other. You can also see that we have objects that look like shapes. For example, these leaves, they look like a shape and not just an outline. Try to mix up these concepts that we practiced and talked about in the lesson so far. This way your doodle will end up more interesting. Also for you as the person who's doodling, switching it up will make it a lot more fun and enjoyable. Rather than repeating the same thing over and over. You can see that basically how I approach doodling is I curve out a space and once that space is small and manageable enough, I fill it in and embellish it similarly to how we did in the combinations lesson. Here's an example of how the scallops flow from one place to another. What this does is it melds two separate areas of your doodle together. Remember this starry night background which we practiced in the circles lesson and also in the combinations lesson, I really love to incorporate it into my doodles. It think it adds a bit of drama and interest. Slowly but surely we're filling in this page so you don't have to worry about the general composition of the doodle. Just focus on the specific area you're working on, curve out a little space in your doodle and embellish it in different ways. It's really easy to curve out manageable chunks in your page using ropes and also using scallops. I like to turn my page around once in awhile because sometimes when the page is just facing one way, I tend to make lines only in one direction and the doodle starts to get a little bit monotonous. So by turning the page, my hand naturally makes a line in a different direction and that switches it up and makes the doodle a bit more organic and interesting. Here you can see that I incorporated a large leaf. Experiment with having your designs pretty small and also having larger and boulder designs. So far, I've drawn quite a few ropes, but you can see that each one has a completely different character. It depends on the width of the rope and also on the design inside of the rope and whether the rope is uniform in width or goes from wide to narrow. Experiment with all ropes in your doodle. Another way to break up the space and carve out a manageable chunk for doodling is to have a leaf that's leaning between a rope and the border of your page or between two ropes. You can see how now we have this smaller manageable area in the page to doodle in to the left of this leaf. Feel free to turn the page if it makes it easier for you to draw lines in a different direction, you don't have to fill in the whole space. For example, here behind the leaves I left quite a bit of blank white page. This also adds interest similarly to filling in areas in the page in black. Here, I decided to outline these shapes and you can see that even though each of these shapes is a separate component in the doodle, I outline them as if they are one, and then I cover up all of the pointy parts here using fill or a blanket. You can see that the blanket adds a really nice background to those shapes. You can keep going, carving out smaller manageable areas in the page and mixing it up similarly to what we did in the combinations lesson by embellishing that small manageable area using all designs. Don't worry about the whole composition, it's going to come together on its own. You can just focus on these small, manageable chunks in the page. Be sure to mix it up between lines, dots, scallops, circles, ovals, filled in areas of black, areas that you leave in white, zigzags, and have your lines going in all directions in the page. Don't forget to use outlines and fills to add more variety to your doodle. You can definitely repeat the same pattern that you did in one part of the doodle, in another part of the doodle. Just like I filled in the top part of the page, I can easily and similarly fill in the bottom part of the page. Since I'm improvising it as I go along, it's going to look completely different, but the principles are the same. I use ropes and scallops and leaves to break up the areas into manageable chunks. Then once I have a manageable chunk in the page, I decorate it in a completely arbitrary way, choosing whichever design comes to mind, or by referring to existing designs inside of this doodle and pulling them into new areas of the doodle. If you just focus on each area of the doodle and you don't even look at the rest of the doodle, it's still going to come together beautifully, you don't have to compose it in anyway. Just keep drawing one doodle element at a time. When I doodle this way, just mixing it up and going from lines to blocked in areas and from scallops to leaves and so on, it makes it very interesting for me, as opposed to drawing the same shape over and over. If you're like me, you might also enjoy really mixing it up in your doodles. You might find as you're doodling, that you're coming up with new designs on the fly, that happens to me a lot and that's a great thing. You don't always have to develop new designs using the little squares like we did in the worksheets in previous lessons, you can just doodle a larger doodle and new designs will emerge as you're doing that. You don't have to finish the doodle in one sitting. This page took me an hour and a half to do and I took a few breaks while doodling it. You can always come back to it at any point and just keep going from where you left off. You can see how if you made a mistake or smeared some ink on the page, it's really easy to cover it up. There you have it, our carvy organic doodle. I really hope that you enjoy doodling as much as I do and I hope this class helped you create more organic carvy and flowing doodles. Be sure to take a photo of your finished doodles and upload it to your project down below and be sure to leave encouraging comments on the work of your fellow students. You're welcome to tag me on Instagram if you'd like me to see your work, I'm @artonthefridge. You're also welcome to check out my YouTube channel, which is also called @artonthefridge. If you haven't already taken my first sculpture class doodle art basics and beyond, you're welcome to check it out. Thank you so much for taking this class. If you enjoyed it, I'd appreciate it if you left a positive review, if you have any questions, leave them in the discussion section of this class. I will see you in the next one and happy doodling.