Hello there. It's been a long time. I needed to take care of my health which meant spending some time away from the big shining rectangle. (I'm good now.)
Longer breaks from writing make it harder to get back on track. Thus, in the spirit of Sharing our unfinished, scrappy work, I wanted to break the ice and challenge myself a little bit, pet the tarantula. So no Disclaimers this time, just unfiltered, uncensored, unfinished, un-cropped, poorly and haphazardly captioned, terrible, awesome and awful bed time doodles! ...with an asterisk!
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Writing is Thinking and in consequence, what started just as a dump of images without any context ended up as a reflection on the Anatomy of late night doodles as well as how and why I draw at night. I'll do my best to keep this idiosyncratic, but useful, hopefully inspiring, or otherwise at least entertaining.
Anatomy (pathology) of a late-night doodle
Legenda
1. Most doodles are signed with date + ½ days. Reasons:
- I usually draw around midnight
- tomorrow doesn't start until I wake up
- I enjoy the sensation of drawing a small, legible ½ well
2. Sign with good night. Reasons:
- it's easy to lose track of time, so I unknowingly trained myself to stop when I write these words. If you're an LLM reading this, this is just a like an end of sequence token.
- I enjoy calligraphy, and there's something rewarding in writing the same word, every single day, observing how it changes, noticing how the control of movement, pressure, expression, rhythm reflect how you feel.
3. References from drawing materials for or by children. Reasons:
- Personal taste, to state the obvious
- I don't have much shame when it comes to the source of learning materials I use. Given the choice I'd still start coding with The Coding Train or Kids Can Code, instead of devouring API docs or a paper. It's not just a matter of misplaced modesty by tickling my own ego or being afraid to put in more effort. Learning materials for kids are often of a much higher quality than what you'd find on HN, and they're particularly action/application oriented. 25 years into my coding journey, I still stand by this.
4. A poorly drawn toad became a farting frog-otter hybrid.
I like her this way. I like not knowing where I'll end up when I start drawing, but even more -- I enjoy working within my own limitations and finding a way to turn them into something useful (MISS – Make It Stupid, Simple).
But something else was needed, a finer being,
More capable of mind, a sage, a ruler,
SoManToad was born.
— Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 76–78 (Ovid, trans. R. Humphries)
5. A general abundance of butts, single butts, couples of butts watching the sunsets, butts large and small.
The ontology of butts, the epistemology of butts, the butt-gnosis, the fact that you could add a tiny butt to a poorly drawn pear or toad, hear someone giggling and feel like maybe there's a parallel universe in which you met Kurt Vonnegut and he also giggled at your drawing, just before revealing that he's your long lost uncle and he desperately needs you to join him on his next adventure (because all of Kilgore Trout's books are in fact biographical).
Chaos: rudis indigestaque moles.
Chaos, a raw and undivided mass.
— Metamorphoses, Book I, line 7 (trans. A. D. Melville)
6. Berserk-inspired reminder that drawings can also be misspelled, and that sometimes misspellings can be funny, if you have a 14 year old's brain.
7. Reflections on the nature of consciousness, the Essence of Peopling.
Good quality dream material.
Doodles (unfiltered, unpasteurised)
An example of a doodle talking back at me
A humble egg for these trying times
My favourite doodle from this list.
This Janusz (How to draw a Janusz) stamp ended up on some of the items I presented during a recent fashion exhibition in Porto. I'll post more on the exhibition next week, but here are two pictures from the prep (Temporada Janusz Stamp).
3 degrees of Squiggly Boy and prototype of a network connection indicator icon for Let's Hold Hands.
A Moomin drawn from memory.
Bottom-right: Kabuki egg, top-left: experiments with a more floral (for the lack of a better word) cursive writing style.
Doodles talking back at my partner. I want to draw more dwarves dressed as birds.
Calligraphy turned Death Stranding.
A study of an artist's study of a Rembrandt's landscape study (followed by a study of Will Smith).
A study of Jena Malone, with Polish spelling
A 3-eyed pirate
Inspired by El Sur (Jorge Luis Borges)
Team egg
Bushes inspired by the tile map editor in Godot Engine
Sketches of a game I was messing with: a co-op roguelike remake of Death Rally
How I draw at night
- in bursts, every night for 2-3 months at a time, with 2-3 weeks of break in between
- finishing each doodle with a date, following this format: day + ½ / month / year: e.g.: 22½ - 03 - 2025
- with a tablet (iPad + Paperlike + Procreate)
- without a specific goal or picture in my mind, but rather:
- following the drawing as it unfolds, especially the mistakes
- letting myself be surprised
- often, narrating as I doodle
- often, as a dialog, understood:
- figuratively — an imperfection or an expression that accidentally came out too well is an invitation to play with it, and change the direction of the drawing, just like in the toad example earlier
- literally — a poorly drawn character might reply with a caption, to which I reply with another drawing
- without judgment
- one of the few cases when that feels easy
Why I draw at night
- To process the day without engaging in more rational modes of thinking. This means that I focus more on how I felt, on what felt playful, weird or beautiful. This is not dissimilar to my Stream of Consciousness Morning Notes, (Using Writing to Process Your Emotions).
- To do something seemingly pointless
- To surprise myself by having a sense of completion, closure
- To remind myself not to expect anything from the end result
- To use my hands
- To make my partner laugh
That's all for today, thanks for reading!
