The margins of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are full of doodles. So are the margins of Charles Darwin's manuscripts, Beethoven's musical scores, and John F. Kennedy's White House meeting notes. This is not coincidence. The act of drawing without a specific goal, of letting the hand move while the mind is occupied elsewhere, is one of the most consistent human behaviors across all recorded history. The question is not whether doodling is a legitimate activity. The question is what it actually does, and why some people turn it into something much more than a margin habit.
A 2009 study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology by Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth found that people who doodled while listening to a boring phone message retained 29 percent more information than those who did not. The explanation is that doodling requires just enough cognitive engagement to prevent the mind from daydreaming and losing focus entirely, without demanding enough attention to interfere with the primary task. That is a small study with specific conditions, but it opened a serious conversation about doodling that had not previously happened in cognitive science.
This guide covers what doodle art actually is, where it comes from, what the major styles are, and how working artists use it in their practice.
Image Source: Wall and Wall
What a Doodle Actually Is
The word "doodle" appears in English as early as the 17th century, where it meant a fool or simpleton. By the 18th century it had acquired the meaning of a sketch or idle drawing. The modern usage, meaning a spontaneous drawing made without a specific plan, settled into common use in the early 20th century.
Defining doodle art precisely is harder than it sounds, because the line between a doodle and a drawing is not sharp. A useful working definition is this: a doodle is a drawing made without a predetermined outcome, often produced in a state of partial attention, and characterized by repetition, pattern, and the following of visual impulses rather than compositional planning. It is the difference between sitting down to draw a tree and finding yourself drawing a tree because your hand started making branch-like marks while you were thinking about something else.
Doodle art, as a distinct category, is what happens when artists take the spontaneous quality of doodling and develop it into a sustained, intentional practice. The result can look like anything from dense geometric mandalas to loose, sprawling illustration to wall-covering murals. What they have in common is the accumulation of marks made one at a time, without a fixed plan, into something larger and more complex than any single mark would suggest.
A Brief History: From Manuscripts to Street Walls
The oldest surviving doodles are in the margins of medieval manuscripts, where monks and scribes added small figures, faces, animals, and decorative patterns to the edges of religious texts. The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1320-40), held at the British Library in London, contains some of the most famous examples: marginal illustrations that include hybrid creatures, hunting scenes, and comic figures that have nothing to do with the text they border. These are not preliminary sketches or decorative additions approved by the manuscript's patron. They are the informal marks of people who spent their days copying text and could not entirely suppress the hand's desire to draw.
The Romantic era brought a new awareness of the sketch as a valid form in itself. By the 19th century, artists' sketchbooks were being published and exhibited, and the preparatory drawing, previously private, was becoming a subject of serious critical attention. This shift created the conditions for taking informal mark-making more seriously.
The 20th century produced several movements that drew directly on the aesthetics of doodling. Surrealist automatic drawing, practiced by Andre Breton, Joan Miro, and Andre Masson from the 1920s onward, attempted to bypass conscious control entirely, letting the hand move without direction and then finding meaning in what emerged. Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut, which championed the unschooled visual language of children, prisoners, and people in psychiatric institutions, valued exactly the kind of untrained mark-making that academic art had always dismissed. Keith Haring's work in the New York subway system in the early 1980s, bold black outlines on white paper panels, brought a doodle-like graphic language into the public space of one of the world's busiest cities.
The Major Styles
Zentangle
Zentangle is a structured method developed by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas in 2004. The method involves drawing deliberate, repeating patterns inside a defined space, typically a 3.5-inch square tile of thick paper, following a specific sequence: corner dots, a border, a string (a light pencil line that divides the tile into sections), and then filling each section with a different pattern called a "tangle." The results look like densely patterned abstract drawings, but the process is designed to be meditative and accessible to anyone regardless of drawing ability.
Zentangle is interesting because it formalizes exactly the kind of repetitive, pattern-based mark-making that people do naturally when doodling, and turns it into a teachable practice. The Zentangle method has been adopted by art therapists, occupational therapists, and educators. It has also spawned an enormous online community and a significant commercial market in specialized papers, pens, and instruction books.
Doodle Illustration
Doodle illustration is what happens when illustrators apply the spontaneous, accumulative approach of doodling to professional commercial work. Artists like Kerby Rosanes, a Filipino illustrator, build extraordinarily detailed images by starting with a single element and letting the composition grow outward from there, without a preliminary sketch. His finished images, which cover entire pages with animals, geometric forms, and interlocking patterns, have the quality of something discovered rather than planned. His books have sold in over 30 countries.
This approach is also visible in the work of Tim Rosenthal, Beci Orpin, and many others who have built commercial careers on a visual language derived from doodling. The market for this kind of work is substantial: adult coloring books based on detailed doodle-style drawings were a significant publishing phenomenon between 2014 and 2018, with titles like "Secret Garden" by Johanna Basford selling tens of millions of copies worldwide.
Street Art and Mural Doodling
Several street artists have developed large-scale doodle-based practices that transform building facades into dense, layered compositions. The French artist Julien "Seth" Malland works at architectural scale, filling walls with figures surrounded by swirling, pattern-based environments. The Portuguese artist Bordalo II constructs three-dimensional wall sculptures from trash and debris. Neither of these is doodling in the literal sense, but both draw on the accumulative, pattern-building approach that characterizes doodle art at a smaller scale.
How Working Artists Use Doodling
For professional artists, doodling serves several distinct functions that are worth understanding separately. First, it is a warm-up. Most artists who work in drawing-based media spend time making informal marks before starting serious work, loosening the hand and getting the eye working before committing to the main piece. This is the equivalent of scales for a musician or stretching for an athlete.
Second, doodling is a problem-solving tool. Many artists report that their best compositional ideas arrive while they are doodling, because the relaxed state of partial attention that doodling produces is good for lateral thinking. The formal constraints of a commissioned illustration are absent. The hand can follow a line wherever it leads, and sometimes that leads somewhere unexpected and useful.
Third, and less often discussed, doodling builds visual vocabulary. The marks, patterns, and forms that appear consistently in an artist's doodles often turn out to be the building blocks of their mature visual style. The recurring motifs in an artist's sketchbook, the shapes they return to again and again without intending to, are one of the best ways to understand what their eye is actually interested in, as distinct from what their conscious mind thinks they should be making.
For more on developing a drawing practice that includes this kind of informal work, our guide to art journals and sketchbooks covers the practical side of maintaining a regular mark-making habit. And for the formal drawing skills that underpin more deliberate work, the guide to drawing fundamentals is worth reading alongside this one.
Materials and Getting Started
Doodle art requires minimal equipment. A fine-tipped black marker, such as a Micron 01 or a Staedtler pigment liner, and a sketchbook with smooth, bleed-resistant paper is enough to get started. The smooth paper matters because it allows the pen to move without catching or dragging, which is important when you are making continuous, flowing lines. Many doodle artists also use a brush pen for varying line weight, adding thick strokes that contrast with the fine detail work.
Color is optional and can be added with Copic markers, watercolor, or colored pencils after the black ink is dry. The black ink should always be fully dry before adding color, which usually takes a few minutes with a pigment liner but can vary depending on humidity and paper absorbency.
If you want to explore Zentangle specifically, the official Zentangle website provides free pattern libraries and method documentation. For inspiration from professional doodle illustrators, Kerby Rosanes maintains an active Instagram presence where he documents his working process in some detail.
Final Thoughts
Doodle art occupies an interesting position in visual culture: it is one of the most universal human activities, practiced by people with no artistic training whatsoever, and also the foundation of several sophisticated professional practices. The fact that the same impulse that produces margin scribbles also produces Zentangle tiles, professional illustration, and wall-scale murals says something useful about where creativity actually starts.
The most honest thing to say about doodling is that it is not a lesser form of drawing. It is drawing with the self-consciousness turned down, and sometimes that is exactly what the hand and the eye need. Start with a blank page, a pen, and no plan. See what the line wants to do. You might be surprised. Share your doodles in the comments, or tell us which style you find most interesting to explore.
