Welcome to 2014!
How Doodle Day started...
What began on May 1st as a one month drawing challenge has snowballed is such a wonderful way that I never imagined when it started...
Doodle Day began after my daughter (only 5 yrs old) made a suggestion on April 31st. After seeing me create a daily doodle everyday for 6 months, she said, "Mom,... I want to doodle with you and we can draw the same things. Let's call it Doodle Day May and you can blog and invite our friends to draw with us." What you should know is that Erin has her own pink sketchbook that she used most days at preschool during quiet time. When the other kids were napping, my little girl would take her pouch of colored pencils and markers from her cubby and draw whatever was on her mind.
I did as Erin suggested and blogged about my daughter and I doodling together and invited our friends to doodle with us. To my surprise, when I checked my blog the next morning, there were 60 people from across the globe who had expressed interest in joining our challenge. You can see that original post HERE. Doodle Day May was born and a Facebook Group was created so that doodlers could freely post their creations and give feedback to others. Click HERE for my summary blog posted at the end of May with my month of doodles.
May ended but...
Doodle Day was soo much fun that many people in the group wanted to continue into June, then July. Click HERE for my summary blog posted at the end of July. While those summer months didn't have themes, I posted a prompt everyday so that those who stare at a blank page and felt anxiety about what to doodle had a little push of inspiration. Prompts are never required to be used - just there if wanted and/or needed. For 2 weeks in August, we did a Character Challenge because I wanted to work on specific age groups others expressed a similar desire so I posted many blogs about distinguishing characteristics in each age group that I gathered from various textbooks, drawing guides, and blogs. See the summary post for the end of the Character Challenge HERE.
Our happy doodlers continued to doodle through September and into October and as a group, we gave November the them of Animals. We doodled a different (mostly uncommon) animal everyday. Click HERE to see the summary of Animal Month.
For December, our group of dedicated doodlers (which had now grown to almost 200 people in the Facebook group and at least a hundred others who email me directly) decided to do an Ocean/Sea Life theme and to make it even more challenging - throw in the A-Z aspect. December 1 began with the letter A and so on until we ran out of letters. The last few days of December were "free" doodles with no prompts. Personally, I finished the month with a cartoon everyday and you can see my entire month of doodles HERE.
Now...we welcome the new year with a new theme. Many of us focus on characters and the object in the central focus of our illustrations (and doodles) and forget about the background. Often, a blend of neutral or sky or a wash is enough to ground our characters but there are also times when the scene needs to be set at a specific location. For those of us who illustrate (or want to illustrate) picture books for children, we need to be able to take our characters to the zoo, the playground, to school, to the store, to every room in a home, outside and inside, and to every other place from the top of a mountain to the bottom of the ocean so a collection of a month full of settings has become our January 2014 theme.
If you are interested in joining Doodle Day, check out the Facebook Group HERE. Once in the group, you can access the files with the daily doodle prompts and you can share your doodles.
If you want to order Doodle Day swag, check out our Café Press store HERE. The prices are set so that I do not make a profit on these items. I have no intention of making money off of anyone's interest in participating in Doodle Day.
If you want to learn more about me as an author and illustrator, click HERE to go to my website. You can also find me on Twitter @AlisonHertz, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Hope to see you in Doodle Day!
