Everyone likes to doodle! During the first part of July, our youngest students, teens, and adults have all been doodling. What is doodling? Normally, it's one of those rare moments when the left brain gets bored and hands off a little bit of time to the right brain. In other words: the scholarly, logical, memorizing, linear, symbolic, mathematical, time-keeping, names-everything side of the brain gives the playful, intuitive, creative, free-thinking, analogical, nonverbal, visual side of the brain a small window in which to have some fun.
In art class, our goal is to allow the right brain to take over and keep the left brain quiet! Doodling is a great way to allow that to happen. Using the ideas in the Zentangle Method, we have found that doodling can be developed into structured patterns and beautiful pieces of art. Find out more about the Zentangle Method here.
I like to introduce interesting materials, and kids love to try new things (especially unusual techniques and media), so we combined our expert doodling skills with copper tooling, to which we added India Ink and Sharpies for additional color and steel wool to rub the tooling. We mounted everything on mat board with gold or silver wire and decorated the framing with metallic pens. Beautiful results - and great fun!
