Prompt #69 - The Mastery of Simplicity

Learn to doodle your favourite animal

Nov 19, 2023

Hi, I‘m Lorena and welcome to The Stress Less Pencil. Together, we create art to make us feel good, not to make it look good. All weekly prompts are designed for total beginners and experienced artists alike, so come join us.

silhouette of bird flying under white sky during daytime — Photo by Slawek K on Unsplash

When I was a teenager, we used to doodle all over our planners, binders, and notebooks. I often tried to draw my favourite cartoon character of the moment, with a prolonged period dedicated to Sailor Moon characters (Sailor Pluto FTW). A good friend of mine would leave Quake 3 logos everywhere he went.

Drawing the same things over and over again eventually led to pretty decent results. And results always give you that warm feeling of being good at something, even if it's just doodling your favourite character on a school table.

So today, let's master drawing something simple.

The Activity: Learn to doodle your favourite animal

Step 1: Choose your animal

Pick an animal you like. Do you have a clear favourite? Go with that one! Maybe it's your Patronus, spirit animal, a beloved pet, or simply an animal you're drawn to.

Meet the narwhal, the long-toothed whale that inspired worldwide legends | One Earth — Source: https://www.oneearth.org/species-of-the-week-narwhal/

Step 2: Find a tutorial

Go to Google image search and type in "how to doodle [your chosen animal]”. You should find plenty of tutorials teaching you a simple doodle version of your animal. Choose one that's simple, with no more than a few steps of basic lines and shapes.

Step 3: Master the Doodle

Practice drawing your animal according to the tutorial multiple times. Draw it small and big, in pen and pencil, with colours and without. Draw it until you can do it without the tutorial.

Step 4: Draw it everywhere

Now that you can successfully doodle your animal without any help, make sure to put it all over the place. Draw it for your friends and kids, doodle it in the corner of your meeting notes, and on the napkin in the restaurant. Draw it when you feel like you need a little moment of success. And enjoy the fact that you are now really good at doodling this!

My Example

The unicorn was the obvious choice for me for this exercise. A while ago, I was gifted a book called “How to Draw a Unicorn and Other Cute Animals,” and this was the perfect moment to get it off the shelf. Following the steps in the book, here's my unicorn practice page (sleeping dog as a bonus):

I love this fluffy unicorn, and I'm looking forward to featuring it in many of my notes from now on. I also really enjoyed trying some of the other animals in the book, especially the Llama and the Mammoth.