How do you doodle? Our idle scribbles can reveal much about ourselves

Library associate Judi Schimke has been doing it as long as she can remember. Tahoma High School student Lisa Harrington started when she was 9 or 10. And when real-estate agent Katherine Gibson was a kid, she did it all over her desktop.

Whether you doodle or whether you don't, it's time to give the doodle its due. So for a moment, let us noodle the doodle, the psychosomatic squiggle tethering the attention spans of those people who, it must be said, always seemed a little sketchy. Images spill from their hands, focusing them like a balance weight, as their minds take information in.

"During lectures, it's nice to just escape and go into a doodle," says Harrington, 17. "It kind of helps me concentrate, because it makes me focus on where I am."

Ana Mari Cauce, a psychology and ethnic studies professor at the University of Washington, describes herself as an inveterate doodler. "Doodling helps me focus my attention," she says via e-mail. "... I can more readily pay attention to what is being said, as I'm not drawn to look out the window, and my mind doesn't wander to issues that were on my mind before the meeting, or to what I have to do afterward."

Those who know her, she says, take her doodling in stride, paying no more attention to it than if she were sipping coffee. "Everyone knows when a set of notes is mine, because they are covered with doodles. I am told that some people actually angle to sit next to me at meetings, as my doodles can be quite entertaining."

Doodle do's and don'ts

Others, though, aren't as forgiving. She recalls once being chastised by a student for being disrespectful, "since I obviously couldn't be paying attention to him while I was doodling."

Go ahead: Take out your pen. Feel free to scribble in the margins as you read this. We won't be offended.

While some might argue over to what degree a person's pen may operate of its own accord, let's establish what a doodle is not. Take the oft-cited story of Texas businessman Rollin King, who scrawled and connected three dots on a cocktail napkin, representing Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. Link the three cities, he told his lawyer, and you'd have a profitable airline. The result: Southwest Airlines.

King's momentous sketch is usually characterized as a doodle, as are many illustrations made by "visual thinking consultants." The only problem is: They're not, really. They're consciously and purposefully drawn, with the artists entirely focused on what they're drawing, whereas dictionary definitions of doodles ascribe some element of the mindlessness to the act.

According to Anna Koren Graphology, based in Haifa, Israel, "one generally indulges in doodling while one's mind is on something else, rather than on the actual matter of doodling."

You're in a lecture. Or on your cell. Or just thinking, not really focused on what your hand is up to. "If you started to think about it, it wouldn't be a doodle," says King County Library associate Schimke. "It would be something contrived." A pseudo-doodle, so to speak.

Who's doodling what

The need to make one's mark probably goes back to the days of cave painting, says Elizabeth Darrow, an art historian at Cornish College of the Arts. The spaces surrounding texts on illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages were purposely decorated with elaborate illustration. And the Dadaists and surrealists of the early 20th century both made conscious efforts not to let their minds interfere with their hands as they created.

What a doodle is, Darrow says, can depend on who's doing the doodling. A practiced artist has more license to informally create images and call them doodles, images to be developed later and shown alongside their work someday in gallery exhibitions. Doodles are, in fact, their M.O., marks made over and over again in search of style. But for us regular Joes, doodles are just offhand scribblings applied to the page while focused on something else.

Real-estate agent Gibson's doodles are swirly and abstract art pieces framing the edges of the paper, absent-mindedly crafted during meetings or phone calls or even while she's being interviewed. They start with long lines that curve along the entire side of a page. Eventually, eyes and faces appear in the reeds.

Any pad will do

Though her preferred surface is graph paper, she'll doodle indiscriminately on anything with her sparkly, multicolor pens. "You would laugh if you saw my address book," Gibson says. "I will never have a PDA (personal digital assistant), because I have to doodle on my Daytimer."

Her business associate, Lisa Strain, has seen her "absolutely destroy" everything from compact disc cases to purchase-and-sale agreements with doodles. "She's a doodling freak," Strain says. "She is physically incapable of having a phone conversation without doodling."

Meanwhile, over at the King County Library, the folks who staff the answer line are on the phone much of the day. They station themselves around a sort of Lazy Susan of directories and scratch pads, fielding inquiries from callers. "Most people leave their doodles behind," says library associate Toni Yuly. "And I'd say Judi [Schimke] was the queen."

Schimke, who now works at the library only part-time, is a prolific doodler. Yuly set aside some of her creations for posterity. "She has a very unique style," Yuly says, describing them as checkered crisscrosses riffed off of staple marks. "[They] were magnificent. I always looked for them when I'd get on the phone."

Schimke's doodles build on what's already there. She has a pencil in her hands at all times. When she finds a name written on scratch paper, she'll make circles around it, or put wheels on it and turn it into a car. She looks at the one she's making now, as she talks on the phone.

"This one I'm making into a truck," she says. "I just do it, and finally when I get off the phone, I go — look at that."

What your squiggles say

What does it all mean? Some have tried to draw meaning from the morass. A doodle study commissioned by British stationery company Europa, for instance, interpreted a number of popular images: Abstract shapes signify freethinkers unlimited by boundaries. Boxes within boxes could mean feeling trapped or overwhelmed, while linked boxes point to linked ideas and a desire to construct.

Flowers, the study said, are the work of creative or self-absorbed people. Spirals drawn outward show the desire to move on; toward the inside, a desire to focus.

Yuly considers co-worker Schimke's regimented crisscrosses against her own curvilinear creations, which Schimke describes as light and feathery. "She's a Virgo, very detail-oriented and very organized," Yuly says. "And I'm not. I'm much more of a dreamy personality."

"It's like with writing," Gibson says. "Anything that comes out of you has something to do with within."

The tech connection

Some wonder whether there's a link between technology and doodling. Did the increasingly common use of telephones prompt idle hands to put pen to paper? "I remember phones being kind of a beginning," Yuly says. "Talking on the phone and doodling as a young girl."

Conversely, she says, students who take class notes on laptops have no place to direct such energies. Schimke, too, says her children don't think much of doodling. "They're on computers all the time," she says. "Little marks and squiggles — that's just a waste of time to them."

Darrow, from Cornish, says many fellow professors discourage laptop use in class, worried it interferes with the hand-eye coordination process of learning — that is, the mind's ability to recall what one's hands have written rather than what one's fingers have typed.

Is the doodle doomed? In general, you might say that such keyboard technology is slowly erasing the sensual, visual experience of writing — and its renegade cousin, doodling — from everyday life. "I think it will change people," Darrow says.

But for the time being, the doodle endures. "It's relaxing, a timeout," she says. "It's a way to access something you can't access in a rational way."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com