Let's Doodle: Dot People

One of the reasons I love doodling is how it brings me back to my childhood. I was the kind of kid who always doodled in the margins. I never felt particularly good at drawing, but I loved filling in those blue looseleaf lines with marks and hearts and flowers while I listened in class.

The other part of doodling in the margins that is so great? There’s no pressure. Margin doodles aren’t for your artist Instagram or your portfolio. They don’t matter at all. Pure artistic freedom. Pencil playtime…

Want to play with me? Let’s doodle together.

Over on Skillshare one of my favorite daily drawing prompts is Mike Lowery’s Blob Monsters. When my preference for circles and people-ish features took over, Dot People were born. (Though, I still love his Blob Monsters and highly recommend you check them out.)

To prove you don’t need any fancy supplies, I’ll be using Crayola markers and a black sharpie on plain old printer paper… Straight from my kid’s art supplies.

The first thing you do is draw a bunch of dots! They can be any sizes at all, any colors. I love rainbows and rainbow order, so I put these five markers in rainbow-ish order and drew a bunch of random dots. They’re totally imperfect, that’s fine.

Now is the fun part… imagine they are little people. Do they have arms? Legs? Which facial features do you want to draw?

Usually I go through one dot at a time and make them each a unique character from start to finish, but today I’m using a different approach going one feature at a time across all dots.

First… eyes!

Give yourself permission to play. There are no rules! Make them all dot eyes. Make them all wide open eyes. Give them all sunglasses. Make a cyclops. You have permission to play!

Next, I went with hair.

All of a sudden this page of little circles has some personality. Hair is such a great way to play around and give a character their own story and style. I almost always make a Dolly Parton hairdo when I do this… otherwise it’s a free-for-all!

At this point my two-year-old decided to get involved… So I took a little break.

When I came back a bit later in the day (because who says doodles are ever done in one sitting?), I added legs. A lot of times I only give my dot people legs and no arms. But I did end up adding in a few arms later on. Again… NO rules!

Some turned out kind of weird looking, and it’s totally fine. We’re playing. It’s allowed to be bad.

Then I started with more facial features - eyebrows, noses, mouths… I switched to the skinny end of my sharpie when it got hard to fit everything. A pen would work too.

I love how eyebrows change these little dots so much! It’s amazing what a few little lines can do.

And finally, the dot people for the day are all done… Ta da!

In total, this took about 15-20 minutes spread out over the day. Just a fun and loose way to play around with art supplies.

What do you think? Will you give dot people doodles a try? Let me know in the comments!