Doodle Away!

This week I Realized how much I draw (aka doodle) in my books for absolutely no reason...  and everyone else is too.  The video we watched in class got me thinking about how many student really pay attention in class (forget about the amount that do not even go) and all the different ways that they do this. I have realized that about half of the people who are in class and awake are on their computers doing various things ranging from Facebook to writing a paper for another class. While the rest of the class is doodling. So this is bad right? No one is really taking in any information? Wrong. According to a TIME Science article research shows that people who doodle actually retain more information than those who are doing other tasks. To explain it simply, daydreaming or doing other tasks takes up too much of your brain for you to still be able to focus; doodling on the other hand does not. Doodling usually consists of simple shapes and shading, something that is not very difficult for the brain to handle. Also if you are drawing you are focused on that and your brain would not trail off and think about anything other than what is going on in class. The lecture kind of becomes your background music.

So this week instead of an oil pastel drawing I decided to give this idea a try and doodle in my classes and it actually worked! Between notes I would draw random things like these

Then after I got back to my dorm I would try to write down what I remembered from the lecture and there was a lot more that I retained compared to when I would just stare blankly at the professor (hmm I never seem to have a problem in Ben’s class J).

So since you are reading this I want all of you guys to try it and see the results.

Here is the article

The Pursuit of Happyness

So this week I decided to do something a bit different. Over these past few week with school stress family stress and world stress (me realizing how much bad is in the world right now) I kind of go to a place where I had no hope. Not just for myself but also that our society can make a change. I do not want to go on another tangent (for that you can check out my RCL blog) but it just made me really sad to think that some people live the way they do. I am not just talking about poverty or mayhem overseas but even here in the US. So that is when I decided to draw this. 

Not to be all “it gets better” on you guys but I wanted to draw something that represents that it really does. It may be hard and it will take a lot of work but things really can get better as long as we are willing to put in the work.

To focus a little more on the picture I chose to make the majority of the picture that dark black/gray color to represent the fact that you may be in this state for a while, it is hard to get out of and without hope you can be sucked in deeper and deeper. So moving into the more happy and bright colors takes up more of the page than the yellow or “happiness” that is supposed to be represented by this. I chose to do that because once again, even though things are getting better, the journey is definitely not over. It takes determination and hard work to get to where your happiness is and that is what I was trying to represent. Then finally you reach your happy place and everything is all well.

I chose to do this today because it is such a good reminder to keep you taking the next step forward because to want to get to that happy place. Also it reminds that yes you might be going the right direction, but all the things you are trying to change is right behind you and it can be so easy to fall back into that place but you cannot reach your happiness if you keep falling back.