“It's a mammoth-sized project that is only one per cent complete”

Sam Cox is a busy man as Mr Doodle, with a recent documentary, an album, a colouring book and a range of Kleenex! Thankfully, he made time to talk to Steven about completing one million doodles, maintaining a healthy work-life balance and how to persuade your partner to completely change your home.

Sam Cox has been known as Mr Doodle since 2017, although the character began several years earlier when a university tutor nicknamed him Doodleman.

“At the end of 2014 I dressed up in this doodle outfit, and I went into university and stood against one of my murals.”

Sam studied illustration at the University of the West of England in Bristol. “I knew the way I wanted to draw, but it helped me understand, giving reason for the drawing to exist.”

Creating a character around the work “helped me package what I was doing a lot better.”

Sam had interviewed at several universities, but Bristol stood out because it seemed willing to support the style he had already developed. “But for me, Bristol stood out as one that really wanted to support what it was that I was already doing.”

Doodling breaks the ice

For Sam, doodling is about the act of making rather than trying to communicate a fixed meaning. “It’s not necessarily trying to say something particular,” he says. The process is deliberately subconscious: “you can't really be thinking about it, 100% of the time you're working on it.”

Doodling, Sam says, actually benefits from distraction. He might have the television on or music playing: “something where your mind's mostly preoccupied and the drawing is happening all the time, but it's not the main focus of your brain.”

Doodling can take forms that “don't always look like my work,” but for Sam the defining feature is the process itself. “That's mostly what I'm doing, that process.”

What he likes most is its lack of exclusivity. “Doodling breaks the ice.” Even if the word is sometimes used dismissively, Sam sees that informality as a strength. “It feels open and accessible to everyone.”

Sam was born in Maidstone into a family with deep roots in Kent. His father initially worked in foreign exchange before leaving banking to open a furniture shop in Tenterden. He now runs Jackie's News, a newspaper distribution business, with Sam’s mother.

Sam remembers school positively. “My best friends are from secondary school. We've stayed a close bunch.”

Halfway through secondary school, “I really found what it was that I should be doing.” He credits several teachers with helping him, including one he still works with today.

“He really helped me find what it is that I should be doing, and having that help made school enjoyable for me. I have a lot of good things to say about school.”

Sam is pleased to see doodling increasingly taken seriously in schools. “It's an amazing thing.”

His own school offered subjects including graphics, ceramics and photography. Sam studied art and media, although his enthusiasm briefly became a concern. “At one point I chose so many art subjects that one of the teachers was concerned I was going to have too much coursework.”

At 18, “before I was Doodleman or Mr Doodle,” Sam got into trouble over his interest in graffiti. Unsure how else to get his work seen, he drew on street and road signs. The punishment “was a slap on the wrist type of thing.”

These days, public authorities are rather more welcoming. “A year ago I was near Ashford train station, and these police officers asked for a selfie with me. I thought it was a really fun full circle moment.”

Now firmly established as Mr Doodle, I ask whether postgraduate study might one day turn him into Dr Doodle.

“It's not something that I've thought that much about.” Sam admits, “maybe one day if the time was right, it would be kind of fun.”

University was easier to contemplate when Sam was younger. Now he has a family, and Mr Doodle is a business, he cannot see himself committing that much time to education again.

Calling himself a doodler perhaps understates how much of Sam’s life now revolves around running Mr Doodle as a business.

He works with a team of five, including family members and a former secondary school graphics teacher. His brother Tom manages the business side, while Sam’s grandfather primes canvases and prepares backgrounds.

“There's a small team of us, and it is a cool business, an interesting business.”

“I can't really be off work too long, because it revolves around a lot of the stuff that I do.”

The team allows Sam to spend most of his time drawing, “but they can't take it off my hands entirely because I do need an input into the projects we do and the direction of travel.”

He estimates the split at “maybe 85% doodling and 15% stuff that isn't doodling.”

That remaining 15% includes decisions about how a room should be covered, which colours to use and the wider planning around a project, “even though the doodles themselves aren't planned as such.”

Sam has recently completed five sculptures across London’s West End, including work at Piccadilly Circus and an orange fish in Leicester Square.

“The doodles on the fish are all themed around cinema and film premieres,” he says, with references to King Kong, Paddington and Batman. “They're never sketched out, but those drawings are relating to the cinemas around that area.”

The subject matter may be tied to the location, but the individual drawings are still decided in the moment.