Different doodling

I went to a sale at Zart Art late last year and there was a man demonstrating using watercolour paints and black pen for an art activity in  the classroom.
I remembered it recently and did  the preliminary work. I had got out my watercolour crayons and just put some lines on paper and then swished some water around.
I experimented by wetting some areas of the paper and not others.  The crayons just did fairly ordinary straight lines where the paper was wet.  When I put the crayon on the dry paper, and then swished water around with a brush, the colours mixed nicely and the obvious pencil marks disappeared.  But overall, the thing looked like a mess.
Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo.
Then, over the next few days, I did a little bit of doodling with a black pen.  I went around the areas of different colours and intensity.

I quite like the result.  I have no idea what to do with it now.  I suppose I should treat it like the zen doodles, just let myself enjoy the process, not worry about the end product.

Doodling and Zen

I have been a bit slack about the black line drawing I wrote about a while ago.  Even though I really enjoyed it and had this (sort of) resolution to do some every week, I haven't done any recently, till the last few days.

I am still working on my bark images and trying to utilise them in my drawing - partly because I have plenty of images of tree trunks to use.

However, I have come across references to zen doodling, zen drawing and zentangles (which seems to be a trademark of the same idea as the other two). There is a whole lot of chatter on the internet about the meditative elements of this doodle drawing.  The recommended way to do it is more freeform than I have been doing but there is a definite similarity.

I also came across an article by Laura Wasilowski in Quilting Arts magazine about zen doodling for designing quilts. It has colour in it rather than the black and white of the zen doodling that I have seen online.  It takes the idea in a slightly different direction, one I don't want to follow at the moment.  But it is worth keeping in mind.