Gnosspelius is lucky — as an illustrator, he’s never had to partake in the general tedium of everyday office life, except once, when he was 18. “I was in need of a job and tried to sell car insurance over the phone,” he says. “I spent the evenings of almost a month in this office landscape. I’m not a very good salesperson so I only managed to sell one insurance.”
If long, boring conference calls and office meetings make you want to press pen to paper (in drawings, not note taking), illustrator Staffan Gnosspelius’ book “Doodle While You Work: Erase the Tedium” — which is filled with pages of half-finished drawings for you to fill in — is your new muse.
“I do a lot of random drawings, and this was a brilliant opportunity to get some of them published,” he says from his home in London. So while you are trapped in a conference room, you can complete such doodles as “Dress Your Boss,” “Draw the Ghost Who Feeds on Your Soul Each Time You Have Lunch at Your Desk,” and “Fill the Elevator with Penguins.” As for the penguins, “Doodle While You Work” is full of ’em, because, as Gnosspelius says, he “identifies with them.” “They seem to have a lot of fun. What other animal slides around on its belly?”
A career coach he isn’t.
1 “Not all doodles are for the sensitive eyes. Be selective with whom you choose to show your most personal doodles to.”
2 “If you get harassed about doodling instead of doing something else supposedly much more important, inform your harasser that you are merely dealing with the problem in a non-linear way,” he advises. “Your subconscious is working hard on solving whatever needs to be accomplished.”
3 “As Da Vinci said, ‘One can never draw too many penguins in one day, as one can never take too many breaths of air.’”
4 “It doesn’t have to look right, seem right or even feel right. Anything is better than a blank page,” he says.
5 “One of the best times to doodle is when you have been wrongly accused of something or told off or humiliated in front of someone quite sexy or are having one of the worst days of the week. Any kind of boss-eating monster or disfiguration of a colleague or soup-spilling accident or explosion or catastrophe can help you take the edge off the situation.”