A DumbDood is simply a doodle that is dumb and drawn on a sticky note! End of post. Now go outside! :D
Just jk kidding. There's a bit more to DumbDoods than that, but that is pretty much the most important thing to know about them. They are dumb doodles drawn on a sticky note!
Get On With It!
Okay, storytime.
In September 2018 I decided that I needed to draw more. It had been well over a year since I graduated from art school and I was burnt out. Between two full-time jobs and everything else in life, I lost touch with the side of me that loved to draw, create characters, and simply enjoy making art for fun. I decided to try and draw one doodle every day and call them "DumbDoods". The plan was to just draw anything! It doesn't have to be good, flawless, or even interesting. I simply just wanted to make myself DRAW. I chose to draw all of them on sticky notes because I like to draw small, but also the sticky notes helped this feel more casual. No fancy sketchbooks, no primo paper, no access to fancy tech or tools. Just a pencil and a sticky note. I like to give myself limitations with projects, and this seemed like a great one to promote casual drawing.
The first 10 DumbDoods (Dood 6 is redacted from this post). This was before I thought to number them, so they simply have the hashtag and date on them at this point. Also, this was well before I had access to a scanner, so I would try my best to get pics with my phone. They're terrible, right? Go ahead, you can laugh. Okay, that's enough laughing. Anywho, you can see that these aren't anything to write home about. They're dumb. They're doodles. Criteria met!
Drawing Everyday Is Really Hard...
Despite my lofty ambitions, there were many days (sometimes weeks... eventually months... and at the end of 2020, years) when I fell behind or forgot to dood a dood. Up until October 29th, 2020 I more or less kept up or tried to "stay on track", assigning every dood done a date and number and even so much as drawing over 120 doods in a week to catch up after a particularly long period of missing doods. Unfortunately, by October 2020 with so many incredibly bad, life-changing events happening in short succession since March 2020, I completely ran out of steam and many things had to give. DumbDoods ended up being a casualty at that time.
Contributions to Burnout
These catch-ups alone were killer. In that DEC 2018 pic above that was like 35 or 36 Doods I got done within like 2 days or something. In retrospect, I think it was pretty unhealthy, but it was so important to me that every single day got assigned a DumbDood. It was a goal I wanted to keep myself to, but working 80+ hours a week, running D&D for two groups, trying to have a social life, and being a human is a pretty bad lineup to pair with trying to reignite my creative passion with a daily drawing, that then needs to be photographed, that then needs to be cropped and uploaded to a computer, that then needs to be shared on 3 social media accounts. Every single day. It was as taxing as that run-on sentence I just wrote!
On top of all those struggles, I also got the brilliant idea to try and record data on the DumbDoods in this Very Dumb Google Sheet™. I still think it's a fun idea, but holy potatoes was that a mountain to try and climb. First, I formatted that sheet horrifically. Second, this was something I did not have the time for and did not make the right tools to help automate the data tracking. It was fun, but wow was it too much. You can also get a really good look at how badly I wanted to stay on track and how harsh I was on myself for falling behind. I was begging to make my very simple idea a Herculean task!
4 Attempts To Catch Up Is 4 Attempts Too Many
During my initial attempt to have DumbDoods be A Thing™, there were 4 major times I had to dood a massive number of doods to keep up with my expectations and hopes. If the metadata in the images I found on my Google Drive can be trusted they were:
The First Great Catching Upning c. late December 2018
The Second Great Catching Upning c. early January 2020
The COVID-19 Catch-Up c. late April 2020
The COVID-19 Catch-Up 2: The Sequel to The COVID-19 Catch-Up c. late September 2020
After all these catch-ups, I almost made it to the end of October 2020, but I then became so overwhelmed by everything that DumbDoods were canned entirely and I stopped drawing for a long time. To be honest, it was pretty heartbreaking for me. Sounds silly, but it was! 💔
A Change of Heart
After my absence from creating DumbDoods from October 2020 to basically January 2022, I have changed my mindset on DumbDoods quite a lot and desire to approach them differently. I really started to feel differently about DumbDoods in August 2020.
It felt bad. It just stopped making sense at that point. After catching up from 121 late doods, it no longer felt right to try and "make up" for missed doods.
One of the biggest struggles I had with this change of heart was the yearly anniversaries of DumbDoods. The DumbDoodiversaries as I called them. I set the date in my calendar and even planned things I wanted to do on/for those days, but again, I was setting myself up to be disappointed and inevitably fall behind. I did manage to make One Hot Mess™ of a video celebrating the first DumbDoodiversary.
I made this thing in a handful of hours late late late into the night of a real shitstorm of a time. At this point, I was helping create and manage a Kickstarter on top of the two jobs and my exhaustion shows. There are a few repeat doods in there, spelling mistakes, and a horribly looped song (sorry Kevin, I did your work dirty).
But! Despite the lumps and bumps, I do still admire the passion and the incredibly dumb fun of this video. It killed me to know I missed the second DumbDoodiversary and never got around to celebrating it. By the time the third and fourth DumbDoodiversaries came and past, the DumbDoods were already left behind.
After a long time away from dooding, I finally feel like I want to try again, but with a better plan and with more compassion for me.
What DumbDoods Is To Me Now
While I ideally will still create one DumbDood a day, I'd rather just number them and record the date they were drawn as opposed to holding myself to a stressful cadence. I plan to get back into things soon, and as I do, I will upload them here! The good news is, as of writing this on January 6, 2023, I have already gotten off to a great start drawing again. Each dood will get a dumb little blog post so it can shine brightly in this little hunk of the internet I am carving out, and I'll probably try to share them on socials here and there too.
If for some ridiculous reason, you want to go dumpster diving for DumbDoods, every single dood is hosted in a gallery on this page of my website. You can also browse the doods in chunks of 100 using the archive links on that page.
What An Incredibly Long And Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Blog Post!
You said it, me! If you're still reading this, thanks for getting past the Wall of Text™ :D
DumbDoods is really dumb as the name implies, but it is something that is very close to my heart and I am hoping to continue to cultivate a passion for drawing and expressing myself... dumb or not!
Thanks for reading.
—💚 Zach