Believe it or not, my kids are fairly interested in what I "do" for a living. The other day my youngest asked me "how do you DO that?" when I showed him a pattern I was working on. I shared my process with him and he was surprisingly fascinated by it!
Many artists like to draw or sketch out their work in a traditional medium (acrylics, watercolors, pencil, ink, etc), scan it in and then rework it digitially. I, on the other hand, am HORRIBLE when working in this manner. I have never taken an "art" class nor do I feel like I could successfully draw anything other than a glorified stick figure. I do, however, LOVE to draw digitally while in Adobe Illustrator and (most of the time) feel fairly proud of what I produce this way! I think it's because I can quickly rework anything that looks off or awkward, unlike traditional methods of drawing (pen, ink, etc.). I used to feel self conscious about this but now I realize that my preferred medium is just my desktop and my mouse! Nothing to be ashamed about.
With that said, there are plenty of times that I simply just "doodle". You know, the same thing you did on your high school notebooks while you were in class? I have pages and pages of random doodles sitting around my office.
Here is an example of one of my doodle pages.
sharpie doodles
This is the part that blew my son's mind. He couldn't believe that I could take this picture of doodles, scan it in and use certain pieces of it to create patterns, like these:
I have a goal to try and design "something" everyday to keep my creative juices flowing. If I'm not working on projects for any of my current partners, I try to build up my portfolio with patterns and illustrations and my doodles definitely come in handy when I'm feeling "stuck".