The Doodle Evolution

I'm submitting an alternative presentation for my dissertation, which will consist of a spoken essay that has animated accompaniments (an animated essay?). For my topic I've been researching the effects of illustration and animation on learning, and this has led to further research into how children learn through the act of drawing. I'm currently reading a great little book called "Artful Scribbles", which analyses how children's psychology, communication and visual skills all develop simultaneously through the act of 'scribbling' or 'doodling'. I've discussed this in previous blog posts, but the basic trajectory is that a child begins with scribbling and develops their motor function skills through a process of meandering lines, to near-perfect circles, to 'tadpole men', to characterised figures (with some other stops in between).

This process is similar in every child, in the same way that communication skills develop similarly in toddlers, and it made me think of how evolution is often portrayed in a similar way; through a series of milestones to represent the constant process. I decided to animate the evolution of children's doodles to accompany my essay.

On a practical note, I made this animation without the use of pegbars and cameras, and chose instead to go with standard A4 paper over a lightbox (to aline properly I just use the edge of the lightbox as a set square guide). I then bulk scanned the sheets using our uni printers, which saves hours overall and gives a really clean, flat finish. No messing around with camera settings or alignment, and every scan is numbered so as long as they're all in order and the right way round then this saves so much time and faff. Future studio goals now include a printer like this.