How to Doodle Unemployed

Step 1

If someone asked you to draw the idea of UNEMPLOYMENT or UNEMPLOYED, what would you draw? When I think about the idea of someone being unemployed, I picture someone job hunting. But that would be difficult to draw. A simpler way to go about this would be to picture them standing on the side of the street begging for money. That would be a much easier way to get the idea across. So let’s doodle that. Begin your doodle by drawing two halves of a rectangle. Make sure the two halves are facing each other and that there is a slight gap between them. These two rectangle halves will become the outline of our sign.

Step 2

Next, use an arc shape to draw the head of the icon figure in this doodle. We are going to keep this very simple. No need to add any details to the head. All you want here is to just draw what looks like a head sticking out behind the sign.

Step 3

Let’s now show that our cartoon figure is holding up the sign. No, this doesn’t involve drawing complicated hands. Drawing hands is a skill that takes a little while to master. We will keep this very simple and just draw three fingers on each side of the sign. These three fingers are holding up the sign in front of our cartoon character. We really don’t need to make it any more complicated than this.

Step 4

Let’s now add some details to our sign. With no details on our sign, this doodle could mean anything. This is why having a bit of detail here is very important. To represent the idea that this cartoon figure is unemployed, let’s first add the word “NO” to the sign. Then right next to the word, let’s draw a very simple representation of money. There are, of course, a number of ways you could do this. This is just one way to draw money.

Step 5

Add the finishing touches to your doodle by giving it some color. And there we have it. This is our visual representation of the idea of someone being UNEMPLOYED. Notice that we didn’t use the word “unemployed”. We rather represented that idea in a visual way that gets the message across that this is exactly what we mean. And that’s how visual note-taking works. Try to keep your doodles as simple as possible. Do enough to get the right idea across. But this is just one of many ways we could have drawn UNEMPLOYMENT. How many other ways can you think of?