Drawing doodles as a routine to improve my mental health
How getting back into drawing thanks to buying a tablet helped me recover my passion for creating art and dealing with the pressure of my daily life.
Early last year I decided that, while I very much enjoyed drawing on paper with a pen or a pencil and waste pages and pages on my notebooks taking notes, drafting sketches or drawing wireframes from the ideas I was working on, there must be a way to make it in a more sustainable way. That is why I decided to get myself an iPad Pro, with one of those pencils that when you draw on them it feels like real inc getting into the paper when it touches the screen.
What I wasn’t aware is that getting that additional screen with a digital pencil for work-related matters would also help me cope with stressful situations and help with my mental health by bringing back one of the things that made me get into the field of design.
Reclaiming an old habit
One of the first things that I started as a kid was to draw random doodles, I couldn’t spend much time on them otherwise I would lose all the interest and leave them undone and somehow that’s something I carried with me over the years, to the point that it’s one of the main things that kept me motivated to practice even more drawing.
I can spend hours moving one pixel up and down until I believe it’s in the right spot, but when it comes to creating art with my bare hands, the quicker I can come up with something the more satisfied I will be, and that’s why I’ve always tried to draw small simple drawings that don’t entail too much complexity, but that is representative enough of what I’m trying to picture.
This habit and involving this technic is something that always helped me get distracted in periods where I was under a lot of stress or I had to spend long hours focused on specific tasks, I will just unwind by picking up a piece of paper and drawing a small doodle of whatever was in my mind at that specific moment. And that’s what, for a…
