The margins of your notebook are the first gallery most artists ever had.

Nobody starts with a clean white wall and good lighting. The work that eventually looks serious almost always began where nobody was going to grade it, in the corner of a page during a dragging lesson. Low stakes are what let you be bad long enough to get interesting. A place where it does not count is worth more than a place where it does.

Stop scribbling out the doodles. Give the edge of your page to whatever shows up there, and flip back through a month of them at once. The repeated shapes are the beginning of a style, and you will not see them one at a time.