LOCKDOWN DOODLES 2020

About the Book

One of the now-accepted methods of reducing stress, anxiety and other mental disorders is to doodle. This art therapy method requires no training or special skill. Everyone can do it; indeed, we all doodled as youngsters. It requires little more than drawing a bundle of lines on a piece of paper with a pencil and then developing it by making changes that start to give it an appearance that looks more artistic. One can start with a subject on the mind before trying to commit to paper. One becomes immersed in the process as it develops thereby taking the mind off a worrying mode. Many become very absorbed in this activity, and that’s when it really becomes strong therapy. The author has strong bipolar disorder; doodling has greatly helped in relieving the downs, and this is especially true when in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic made the depressed state even worse. The production of doodles during the lockdown yearning was surprisingly high with an average of a new one every second or third day. The author hopes readers will like the doodles and attempt to draw some themselves when feeling down.

About the Author

Denys Wheatley is a retired academic, and he has run his own biomedical editing and publishing company until 2022. He has published six books of his own and has been involved as a coauthor in another four. Denys has many qualifications in science and medicine and has written hundreds of research papers. He has been interested in art since he was young. At the age of sixteen, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (in those days more accurately described as manic depression), an unfortunate genetically inherited condition. Throughout his busy research into cancer, he engaged in little doodling but did a considerable amount of still life, landscapes, portraits, and abstract artwork. Doodling took off in 1998, when severe depression occurred. Since then, he has completed more than 750 doodles, many of different sizes, the largest being 105 × 87 cm. In more recent years, with COVID around, the doodles were mostly on A4 paper and in portrait orientation. Almost all are done in pencil, but a few are also coloured. Their themes are highly varied. Over the last decade, he has been helping mental health groups mostly through art therapy; he completed the Scottish Mental Health First Aid (SMHFA) course in 2016. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, one of his major publications in 2012 was BipolArt: Art and Bipolar Disorder—A Personal Perspective, published by Springer, Dordrecht, ISBN 978-007-4872-9, doi 10.1007/978-007-4872-9.