She Sure is {Sketchy} Monday Afternoon Doodles

I take late meetings at job-job on Mondays and we talk about video games and sound effects and commercials from the 90s. Sometimes I doodle. Today was one of those days.

She Sure is {Popular} Scribble me This

As a child, I was a wit. I could dance the hula. I had great hair. I was working on an ever expanding vocabulary. However, it was clear early on that my parents took their greatest reward in rolling me out for this one parlor trick. Draw a scribble. Give it to the girl. She'll make it sing.

 

I was sure my parent's friend's desire to see the girl who scribbled was just a fluke. However, apparently the interwebs and my family and friends all see my worth the same way.  My blog gets more than a quarter of its fame from society's apparent insatiable hunger for "Scribble Drawings". Google brings them  here. So today I scratch my head, and let Jon scribble away on this lined paper, where I build a popular menagerie of mingled line.

p.s. in keeping with today's Illustration Friday theme... I might be responsible for a clean million of the views on this video: http://youtu.be/8UVNT4wvIGY

Scribble Drawings

I've mentioned my scribble drawings in the past, but I've never shown you them. They're my own personal version of the Rorschach inkblot test. While they're not scientifically backed up by any research or scientific finding, I swear by them, as do many of my friends and several random middle school kids who ride the F train with me in the mornings. Whenever I'm having trouble jump-starting my imagination I'll do a scribble drawing.

I prefer someone else do the scribble, as it keeps me honest. I want the scribbles to be wild and not at all driven or coerced. The best way to do that is to have someone else create one. I have friends in Spain and Australia who will actually email me scribbles from time to time. They love seeing the end result. Growing up I did them as parlor tricks for company. In college I sold them for a dollar a piece in Union Square.

I squint at a scribble and twist it around a bit, and then go in for the kill. After a few of them are sitting side by side, I'm back in creation mode. They get me ready to draw like mad again. They work like a charm and never fail.

Here are a few of my faves done in a scribble drawing binge with friends at Two Boots last Monday.

The red line is the scribble, the black the scribble drawing:

This one below was a collaboration with Garrett Rose. When everything was said and done, a few people could actually tell that it was a whistling beatnik. One of the great testaments to the bliss of scribble drawing is that most people watching get excited and eager to try their hand at it. Garrett jumped in on this one and started getting his sea legs.

This fun little frog guy was done by Rachel Micheal. I provided the scribble ;)


I highly recommend a scribble drawing a day. I kind of binge scribble draw these days. They will make you forget yourself, and in this crazy art world that's never a bad thing.

If you have any random scribbles lying around you want me to take a stab at,
remember I'm only a click away: info@amberalvarez.com
Afterall, I could use the help ;)