The greatness of post-its

When I'm struggling for inspiration at work I do what many other office workers do and doodle. But I'm very particular about what what I doodle with, and what I doodle on. I have to use a specific black felt-tip pen, and I have to have a post-it note to draw on. And by post-it note I mean the regular yellow, square post-it notes - proper post-it notes, I mean, not some cheap knock-off.

Over the years I've come to regard the post-it note as the perfect canvas for quick illustrations. It's perfectly sized for a quick BAM-BAM sketch that takes no more than a minute or two to bash out. And usually when I've finished a doodle I'll roll the post-it note into a long thin tube, crush it, and chuck it in the bin.

(Though I did once keep hold of a load of these tubes, and over the course of several months attached about 20 of them together to form a long, thin stick with the intention of using it to poke other members of staff without having to leave the comfort of my chair. Sadly the uber stick was somewhat lacking in structural integrity and collapsed under the weight of its own greatness during the course of the inaugural prodding)

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks I've found myself unable - or rather unwilling - to bin some of the doodles I've created, and not really knowing what else to do with them I thought I'd share them here with you.

So here you are.

Fun with post-it notes begins with a pretty obvious Dingbat that I directed towards a colleague in jest.

A really quite crappy sketch of the Enterprise. Notice the blue deflector dish; I generally don't use colour in my doodles, but I thought this lifted it a smidgeon.

Odo from Deep Space Nine. I'm rather proud of this one - I like the way he's offset to the right of frame, and he's got a particularly melancholy look on his face that I find strangely appropriate. Obviously the whole Star Trek theme is something of an occupational hazard.

The Joker. I didn't actually intend to draw the Joker, but I started with a particularly demonic pair of eyes enshrouded in shadow, which kind of lent themselves to him. Again, I used a little bit of colour for effect.

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An aside:

I'm really hoping it starts dropping down cold soon because I rather fancy the idea of wrapping myself up in an old vintage muff.

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Actually, I've always rather liked the idea of organising an exhibition where you just get loads of people to draw whatever the hell they want on a normal post-it note then show them in a gallery. I'm sure it's been done, but I'm strangely drawn to the idea of several walls just lined with hundreds and hundreds of unique post-it illustrations. And really, who doesn't have the time to scrawl something on a small yellow square?

Oh, but wait! That's not all they're good for - why this very afternoon I also fashioned one into a tiny hockey stick.

Actually, this is a reasonably poor facsimile of the original which proved necessary after an ill-timed combination of iPhoto crashing moments after I'd clicked the 'delete originals' option, wiping about five photos I'd taken today. Take my word for it when I say the original was *awesome*.