While I don't remember being encouraged to play with my food as a child, I can't remember being told not to. And so I did. I also vividly remember playing with all sorts of inanimate objects, bringing them to life in my mind to create stories and action sequences. It's what kept my attention in school (not on it).

As I started to get into doodling in my late teenage years, and more specifically, intricadoodling, the world around me changed, and the sickness of Pareidolia really started to take hold.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (e.g., in random data).

Basically, everywhere I look, I see faces and characters hidden in objects, stains, clouds, light, and the really obscure relationships among objects overlapping. They can haunt me, tease me, keep me from feeling lonely, make me laugh, and make me appreciate the power of perspective.

Here's an example from 2004

What is an Intricadoodle?

Blank canvases still stifle me. I need something to work off of to get the vision flowing, so I usually just squiggle a line across the page and work from there. That then gave birth to a style of doodling I created around 2002, where I draw a shape, create a character. Somewhere next to it create another character. Then the negative space in between it creates the next, then the next, and so forth until there is no negative space left.

What can I say, I like to create positive from the negative! 😜

Here are a couple examples of using 5ft canvases as my doodle pad:

A more refined digital version:

I bring this up because it really amped up seeing faces in everything. The more I do it, the more I see it spill over into the real world.

If I already have it, why a 30 Day Challenge? As I let other priorities of life get in the way, I stopped doodling them and I felt my creativity start to get stiff and stifled. It's the worst feeling as someone who knows how much they thrive when juices are flowing. So I used the 30 days to commit to doing 1 a day.

As I'd walk around during my day, if I saw an interesting shape, I'd just snap a pic on my phone, then sometime later that day, sit down for 10-60 minutes and bring it to life to show how I saw it. It was my daily 👁 Spy.

Here is a gallery of what I saw, and I put them in chronological order, some are quick are rough, others I really fleshed out. When I start to take it too serious, I start to feel like it's a chore and I lose interest. It's a pattern I have.

💡Tip: Click on the first image to bring up the image viewer, use Right Arrow key to see it reveal on top