Did you ever think about how sketching or even doodling could benefit your life? Of course it also benefits your artist’s eye but it has more far reaching abilities that perhaps you never thought of. Here are some ways in which sketching or doodling can help you!

Sketching Improves Visual Acuity

Drawing, sketching, or doodling can help your eyes learn to see detail you would otherwise dismiss from day to day. Because you are paying attention to the details as you draw and learning to see shape, value and form your eyes begin to notice more detail everywhere in life. Around your home, in the faces of people you love and in the artwork you observe. Our brains can be trained to see detail which then carries over to our powers of observation.

Sketching Helps You Learn to Solve Problems

Sketching is also about solving problems or visual obstacles. While you are sitting and drawing people in a park, or animals at the zoo, you come across the issue of movement. How do you capture that movement? With long swirls of lines, short pencil marks, sweeping brush strokes? These are problems you must figure out the solution to. Not everyone’s solution will be the same either, which is wonderful!

Sketching Helps You Form Your Worldview

Those tiny marks you’re making are expressions of you and your personality. Sketching gives you special insight into the way you view the world around you. Like a journal, it can capture the depth and beauty of feeling in your soul at the moment.

Sketching Produces Fresh Ideas

Creating any kind of art can inspire you to try new ideas and things but sketching by itself can be so beneficial for producing new thoughts and motivation to pursue your dreams and goals. When you allow your mind and heart to get creative, amazing things happen in your thought processes and your abilities to be productive. Science has also revealed that creating art can stretch and grow your brain by helping your motor skills and cognition. Some even suggest it improves the way your brain ages.

So grab that sketchbook and pencil, find anything to sketch and have at it! Your brain, body and well being will thank you!

Blessings of Beauty

Laura Miller