One of the qualities of my doodling art form, or Lifelines, as I affectionately call it, is the random, free-flow of shapes, forms, and ideas. But in contradiction to this, sometimes certain “doodling rules” emerge in a composition…certain repetitive forms that can make a random composition a “pattern”. In most instances, this just “happens” among the random pen strokes…I will try something and think, “love that!!!” – then do compositions with a variation on that theme.
One of the techniques that has emerged from these “happy accidents” is a technique I like to call “shingling”. 
Shingling involves building a composition by the repetition of a particular shape through the stacking and layering of that shape from the corner of the sheet. Once the foundation is laid, I then add more detail to the composition through shadow, patterning, line weights, and shading. This is one of my favorite techniques, because the finished product has so much depth and definition and, while the inital approach is very simplistic, the finished product appears to be very complex.
Please enjoy a few finished products using the shingling technique:
