If you follow me on FB, Twitter, or Instagram, you might've noticed that for the last few months I've been posting a #dailydoodle. (Well...I don't post one EVERY day. But I post them regularly enough.) They're something I started doing as a writing warm-up--and I know you're probably thinking: how does doodling help your writing? But I swear it does. It gets me in a mindset to not be such a perfectionist.
Drafting is a messy process, and I hate it because of that. I want the words to be lovely and shiny and done as soon as I type them. So if I don't do something to stop myself, I'll start revising way too early. Cue the #dailydoodle, which I always do in ink, because it forces me to live with all my tiny mistakes. Sooner or later I'll draw a line or make a mark I wish wasn't there. But since it's permanent, the only choice I have is to keep going. And the really funny thing is, I always find a way to hide it. Or sometimes, the mistake even ends up making the drawing a whole lot better.
So I'll doodle for an hour or two, remind myself that it's okay to make mistakes, and that's it's better to just keep moving forward and not look back. It's been working really well, and for fun I started posting them on my social media, and the response has been ... well ... pretty surprising.
Here's a few examples, in case you haven't seen them. My style is sort of a mix between Zentangling and line drawing:
I sell the originals by request, usually through Facebook, though email works too. You just have to contact me when you see one you want. They're not all that expensive, but there's only one of each, so setting up an Etsy shop and doing individual listings is too much work--especially for how fast they seem to sell. So for now it's: see one, contact me, and first come first served.
But since a lot of times more than one person wants it, I've also set up a way for people to buy prints. Behold, my Society6 page: