Doodles as Their Digital Selves

I have doodled for as long as I can remember. My father was a talented artist, and drawing was simply part of the atmosphere I grew up in. Much of my doodling happens while listening to music or while watching television at night. These are not sketches toward finished work. I am not striving for mastery over a medium; I am letting the pen move, following instinct rather than outcome.

I have always used black sharpie magic markers to capture glimpses of dreams, fragments of imagined creatures, thoughts that did not yet need language. For years I rarely shared the images instead in notebooks, on scraps of paper, or tucked away. 

During the pandemic, that changed. I began a regular email outreach called Friday Friends, where one or two doodles would ponder life and converse with one another. These were and still are sent out every Friday. In the beginning these were merely doodles with handwritten notes on Post Its today many images are AI adapted from my earlier work.

Recently, I began revisiting older doodles using AI to give them three dimensions. I work with AI as ann additive, not a replacement. I have always painted and drawn over my photographs; for me, AI is simply another way to add to the doodle’s conversation. It allows me deeper exploration of an image giving it more life with volume, weight and surface.   

I work on these adapted images until they resonate with my original intent. Occasionally AI moves in an unexpected direction that I also find compelling, but I always approach the work with a clear vision. The doodle remains the source, while the adapted version introduces something new: more depth, more physicality, and often a bit more cheek. 

Seeing these figures take on dimensional form gives them a different kind of life. They feel less like drawings and more like small beings; playful, strange, and more fully themselves. The process does not overwrite the original; it extends it. The line drawing and the 3D form now coexist. 

A few of these doodles have also found their way onto small objects, cards, tattoos, journals and blankets. Ways in which they exist outside the studio and can be encountered in everyday life.  

Paula Phelan,

Founder, PiP Art Gallery