Platonic Doodle Dates

One of my favourite YouTube channels is Doodle Date, with adorable couple Adam and Steph who do many arty challenges and activities together.  More than a few of the challenges have appealed to me and been added to my list of things to do.  When my friend Cayden was scheduled to come stay with me for my birthday weekend I decided that we should take on a Doodle Date challenge, but since we’re not a couple it would be a Platonic Doodle Date.

When we sat down to decide what to do, another favourite YouTube channel Draw With Jazza had just posted a video that we loved the idea of, so we ended up having a Platonic Doodle Date that wasn’t actually on Doodle Date.

In the video Jazza uses his Arty Games app to pick a bunch of challenges at once.  I happen to have the Arty Games app, and it’s really useful when you don’t know what to draw.  Not to mention a bundle of fun.  Jazza chooses a time challenge, a colour challenge, an environment prompt, a character prompt and a scribble.  Cayden and I are both relative new to drawing so we decided to skip the environment and character prompts for our first attempt.

So, for the timed portion.  We decided that since we both have quite simplistic styles at the moment, ten minutes would be plenty.

Next up, the colour selection.  We wanted as many colours as possible so we set the app to pick five.

And finally, the scribble…

However….  isn’t there always a “however” with me?  I got out my box of markers and went to pick out the right colours.  I don’t have a full set of very expensive Copic markers.  I have a small amount of Copics, a small amount of Promarkers, some Ohuhu, some DoCrafts and some TouchFive markers.  So I tried swatching a lot to get the same colours and it just wasn’t happening.

Which lead to the Platonic Doodle Date being delayed for a few hours.

Jazza’s app lets you add the type of pen set you have, except that it doesn’t have any of my other markers.  So I decided it would be a good idea to swatch all my markers and attempt to colour match them to Copic numbers. I did look for a conversion chart online first, but couldn’t find anything.

It took several hours, and lots of scrolling through websites selling Copic markers.  It was fun, but difficult.  There may be 358 Copic colours, but that isn’t enough!  So many of my markers didn’t fit any Copics, and there were more than a couple of times where two differently coloured markers ended up with the same Copic number.  But I finally had a set of “Copic” colours.

And so we re-generated the colours…

Then we decided that black shouldn’t really count, since we’d be inking in black anyway.  So we picked an additional colour…

The eagle-eyed among you might notice that B16 appeared already.  Luckily B16 was one of those Copic colours that had a couple of my markers attached to it.  So we ended up with the following colour palette…

So we swatched, we drew out our scribble into our sketchbooks…

…we set out our pencils, erasers, inking pens and markers, we set up the timer and off we went!

Ten minutes is not enough.

We sketched okay, and we inked okay…

…and then lost all sense of sanity during the colouring.

Cayden (the green haired character) did a better job at the colouring than me (the bird) because he was sensible and used an A5 sketchbook instead of a huge A4 one like I did.

It was hectic, and adrenaline-filled, and a LOT of fun. We both agreed that we should have done 20 minutes. And we both plan to redo our pieces without the time limit, just to show how good we really are.