Some people have a vocation and an avocation. Tom Helland illustrates for a living, but his linear and figurative creative lives are intertwined and revealed in the wealth of doodles he's created since childhood.
Creative director of the Bloomfield Hills office of
Organic Inc. a national advertising firm, Helland's inner engineer and illustrator collaborate in a subconscious flow of doodling during business meetings or sipping coffee at Starbucks.
Like the fraternity of doodlers who scribble during meetings, his involuntary act of creativity has resulted in strange combinations of geometric patterns and cartoons – results of the engineering he studied at Oakland University and the illustrator he became at the
College for Creative Studies (CCS). In his
illustrated biography, Helland doesn't separate doodling from his professional development, beginning with "marbles + doodling" in elementary school to "engineering + doodling = flunking" in college, and arriving as a "professional doodler" in the advertising business. His portfolio of illustrations and doodles appear to be the same images, only one comes from a natural flow and the other uses the style to deliver a commercial image.
"I need to doodle or I'm going to fall asleep or completely zone out. It's something to keep me focused," says Helland, whose work as creative director often involves lengthy meetings, some of which are tedious. "I see productivity here quicker than I do my day job. In my day job, you design, you create. It goes through revisions, it goes through client meetings. It's a slower process. With this, you start and you see where it will go. You keep going and fill (space) the way you want to fill it up."
It begins with something as simple as a line, or an "X" – usually a geometric pattern, but a cartoon face will often emerge. The medium is usually his moleskin notebook or any scrap of paper, including Post-It notes. His tools are standard office ink pen, highlighter, or Liquid Paper. Helland has a special interest in working with espresso blots. He once spilled a few drops of espresso at work and thought of drawing in the amorphous brown space. The result? "Coffee Doodles."
Helland graduated from CCS in 1985 and after working in various advertising jobs joined Organic in 2007. As creative director at Organic, he has supervised the Chrysler Group Dodge, Chrysler, and Jeep ad campaigns and is heavily involved in retail online advertising. Doodling often feeds his work – solving creative problems by opening an avenue of thought otherwise hidden.
"All of my assignments are solved through my doodles," he says. "That's the way I work. I write things down in meetings because I have to." In the commercial vein, these notes of a different sort help channel his creativity with his work, Helland says. "Some people get on the computer and start designing. I'll get a piece of paper and crank out a lot more concepts quickly and more efficiently." In that case, the doodle becomes a functional sketch, rather than an abstract illustration. The idea develops through scribbles.
"As I've become older, I plan a little more (but) it's still random," Helland says. "When I start out, I don't know what it's going to be. I may start out with a square and then it becomes a landscape of geometric birds flying across it. I didn't start thinking that that's how it would end up." If he gets deep into a doodle and really likes it, "then I want it to be really nice. It goes from a doodle to a piece of artwork. For my work and free lance illustration, I start with sketches, pre-determined ideas, with thoughts about how much room it's going to take…special relationships." But the process is different from his intuitive doodling and involves more tension. "If I have a freelance job with a specific concept that has to be illustrated a certain way, no matter what I do there's a kind of stiffness to it. It's not as organic…"
As with many doodlers, Helland's passion offers relief from a boring meeting. In one such scenario, he drew a teapot spouting steam. In another, he began with an X that led to a second X with eyes in a grimacing face shouting, "Stop!"
The process of doodling is subconscious and the use of it in commercial design is deliberate, he says, but the two are intertwined in his professional life. "I would not call them Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but rather Oscar and Felix (Neil Simon's
The Odd Couple)."
Doodling differs from a daydream, according to a study published in the February 2009 edition of
Applied Cognitive Psychology, the journal of the
Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. The study, authored by Jackie Andrade, Ph.D., states that daydreaming is a departure while structural doodling actually retains more information than not doodling. Helland would argue that's mostly the case with his preoccupation. Some may view it as rude for the lack of eye-contact, but few have caught him lost in the cognitive stratosphere.
Enchanted Mind, a website that explores the psychological foundation of these scribbles of the subconscious, notes that "To use creative expression and solutions in your everyday life, it is necessary to dip into the unconscious at will. Doodling is one way of doing this."
Referencing the psychologist Carl Jung,
Enchanted Mind adds, "Doodling essentially allows our intuitive feelings to express themselves in pictorial symbolic form." Indeed, Helland notes that while reticent to express opinions publicly, "I can read some old doodles like hieroglyphics" and recall personal expressions.
While doodling in an engineering class at Oakland University, Helland realized he wasn't cut out for engineering and enrolled at CCS. Though he may not be a professional engineer, his output is in the form of largely geometric or mechanical images. Curiously, his father, an engineer, was also a doodler.
He generally doesn't analyze his doodles, but Helland has kept all of his sketchbooks and occasionally considers what might be behind these linear journeys. His free doodles, in their original scrap format, are often the final versions of his artwork, not preliminary, as with some artist sketchbooks.
Occasionally, he'll revisit one for a more formal piece, but generally not.
Helland was commissioned by his wife to create art for the kitchen walls of their Rochester home. Working with two parallel spaces, Helland started designing. "It was two sides of a picture window in our kitchen that looks out on the back yard…. I like cars, transportation, so I started with a motorcycle, then it slowly layered into a tall narrow illustration of traffic: trains, planes, ships, hot air balloons, and in the middle was a convertible with a family of four driving in traffic away from you. We like to vacation – me and the family were getting away." On the other side, Helland envisioned a family of four floating in a boat. Below the surface was an abundance of fish. "I always have enjoyed drawing fish. I don't know why. They were big doodles."
Aside from his portfolio, Helland has exhibited his doodles in a few shows, including the
Detroit Twestival. He has considered marketing his work, but thus far it remains a private passion.
Doodlers are known to slip into a mild trance while scribbling, but it's not a thoughtless state, Helland says. "People ask me what I think about when I doodle. I could be thinking about anything. When I grew up I had a cat. When you were teasing the cat or had its attention, his tail was always doing something else. Or the cat was looking out the window and you'd try to touch its tail, but it senses you there. It's as though the cat and the tail think separately. Sometimes that's how I feel. I could be engaged with my head and my focus, but my hand is doing something else..."
Photos:
Laser doodling with Tom Helland
Tom Helland's doodle book
All photographs by Marvin Shaouni
Marvin Shaouni is the managing photographer for Metromode & Model D.
Dennis Archambault is a regular contributor to Metromode and
Model D. His
last article was Scoring Michigan's New Film Industry.