Back when I was in high school, I drew this:
This is one of my favorite doodles from back then. Black with a white shadow, white with a black shadow, and red mixed in throughout.
What does it all mean? It can pretty much mean what ever you want: life/death, good/evil, yin/yang, earth/sky/fire, physical/spiritual. Sometimes they meet, sometimes they seem to clash, sometimes they seem to work together, and sometimes they go their separate ways.
Do you see something else? Feel free to let me know.
However, the fact that I drew it on lined notebook paper always bothered me. Every time I looked at it or thought about it, I wondered what it would look like with out the lines running through it, or if I had used something other than a marker pen and a colored pencil to fill in the solid areas.
Well, today I was able to find out!
Makes quite a difference. I love how the red is now actually solid, the black is black and the white is white, and there’s no blue lines running through the whole thing.
The original piece still has it’s charm, but that’s the beauty of digitally remaking a piece. I still have the original on paper. I still have the scan of the original, and I now have this reworked version.
Now, I have recently been experimenting with digitally re-working some of my old doodles, but I did not re-work this one. Someone with much more knowledge than I on how to do things like this graciously did this one for me. (Not only did she do a most excellent job, but she explained how she did it. Not surprisingly, when she told me how she went about it, I found out that I had been doing things the hard way…Live and learn I guess.)
Her name is April, she is awesome, and you should check out her awesome blog: Ponderingspawned.
What are you still doing here? Go! Go now! And while you’re there, be sure to look in on her World Through Our Eyes project. You can get there through her blog, by clicking the image/link in my footer to see the WTOE feature she so generously did on a story I wrote, or be lazy and click here.
memoirs of an unremarkable man 
Thank you so much! This really brightened my day!
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🙂 It brightened my day too!
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aloha CTPerry744. i see it as symbolic of life choices. or possibly the thought process of life choices. doodle on. aloha.
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Hi Rick. That’s pretty insightful, thanks for sharing. I suppose following that same line of thought, it could be symbolic of the results, or consequences, of life choices.
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possibly yes. in some ways i see it more along the lines of representing an “ongoing path” rather than an end result. there always seems to be off-banchings that weave in and out of our choices.
visual art is probably one of my stronger interests. which is probably why i was drawn to this (pun intended if it’s fun).
also imo, as viewers we each bring our own background to the viewing. in that sense we will each see in our own way.
it’s cool when the way a viewer sees a work overlaps with what the creator sees but as i see it this does not have to be what happens at all.
in fact sometimes a viewer will see something in my work in a way i had never thought of until they showed it to me. once they show me, i then often see it too.
one of the things that i think is cool about art is that once a work is created it begins a life of it’s own. as creators i think we have to let our work have that life—and be open to what it brings up in a viewer.
i like when a viewer tells me what they see before i speak about the work. that way i get a good reading of what the work brings up for a viewer.
those are just my thoughts tho. others have different ways of seeing this and that is cool too. fun on. and as i said, doodle on too. aloha.
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I know what you mean about having other people point out things they see in something you’ve drawn. That’s happened to me more than once.
It’s always great when someone sees something you didn’t, and sometimes that gives you ideas for directions to try that you never would have thought of otherwise.
And puns are great too. Never be afraid to leave a pun around here!
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