Building Your Visual Vocabulary

​One of the modules in You Can Doodle concentrates on building your own visual vocabulary. I think this module is one of the most important things to learn. It’s also something that you keep on learning and requires practice every day, much like learning to speak a new language. To be really good at it, you have to keep practicing and use it to every day.

A visual vocabulary are the tools of your new doodle language. So when someone says doodle a cat, or a dog, or a document or a concept like evidence, you immediately know what to doodle without having to think about it or without having to find an image to get ideas from.

Here are some of the things I doodled from Diane Bleck’s books to practice doodling different animals, arrows, layouts, speech bubbles, borders, frames, business concepts, clothes, flowers, food, hands, toys, and transport. There so many things you can doodle and so many ways you can use doodles.

Building a Visual Vocabulary

​These are just some of the things that you can doodle to find the right image to represent words in your own vocabulary. I started with thinking about a word or a concept and what it might look like to see if a can doodle something to represent that word. If I get stuck or want some more ideas because I’m still learning and developing my skills I look to books for a point of reference and also Google images offers some great icon or clip art images that can really inspire new ideas.

I’m currently working on creating some images for my administration business and here are some examples of what I’ve been doodling.

Evidence

Incident Report

Voicemail

I’ve created these using the skills I’ve learnt in You Can Doodle and in Electronic Doodles. I’ve used Sketchbook Pro on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 to draw and colour these icons.

As building your visual vocabulary is something that you keep on doing I will continue to share images from my own vocabulary as both my vocabulary and my skills develop and improve.