Recent Callidoodling

I’ve posted several times in the past about my doodling in church, which I’ve come to refer to as “callidoodles.” I don’t really do this as a tool for generating design ideas – it’s more of a form of meditation, or distracting one side of my brain while the other continues to work. But once in a while, some promising ideas do emerge, and since I haven’t posted much this year, I have a pretty big stack of callidoodles that I haven’t shared. Here are a couple of recent ones.

A lot of my doodles involve incorporating some sort of small picture or graphic with lettering, like this:

I liked that doodle for the clean lines of “Rescue Me” against the more classical Roman form of “LORD,” as well as the way the breaking waves of water work around the letters. I think it could be re-worked in more finished form by using some Photoshop effects to generate the splashing water, and perhaps adding some 3-D effects to the letters.

In other doodles, I occasionally find that a new calligraphic design just pops out of my subconscious:

It’s not unusual for me (or any calligrapher, for that matter) to use a “liaison” in joining two or more letters in my calligraphy, but in this case, there are actually seven letters involved, which is much more complicated that I would ordinarily attempt: the bottom of the “L” in “lose” forms the crossbar of the “f” in “find,” the “s” in “lose” also forms the left-hand stroke of the “N” in “find,” the exit stroke of the “e” becomes the ascender of the “d,” and the dot over the “i” in “find” also becomes the crossbar of the “e” in “lose.” If I had been consciously attempting this, I don’t think I could have pulled it off, but somehow, as I was just doodling without attempting to be “successful,” I managed to do it. I think it’s an interesting idea for a design. And lifting up the two words “lose” and “find” and tying them intimately together works for interpreting the scripture quote as well.

I’ve been asked to put together some of my calligraphy to be used as graphics on our sanctuary video projection system for an upcoming worship service (date to be determined), and I’m thinking I’ll try to do some finished versions of some of my callidoodles; these two will probably be used, if I can pull them off once the more careful and cautious parts of my brain get involved.

2 thoughts on “Recent Callidoodling

  1. Thanks for showing us the doodles….oh my…..I’m wondering how you do this discreetly….although notes on the sermon are not a problem for me I don’t doodle in church but you seem to be a master!!! Maybe I should start a trend….
    Whatever the doodles enjoy celebrating the true reason for the season.
    Blessings from Northern Ireland.

    • I don’t know how discreet I am in doing these doodles, but I usually sit in our choir loft, and the same two people are normally to my left or right, so I think they’re used to the idea that I will be doodling during the sermon :-)

      Thanks for the comment!

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