Mr Doodle valuation

Covered a whole house, inside and out, in black-and-white doodles, and then wrote about what it cost him.

What a work by Mr Doodle is worth

Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.

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Bio

Mr Doodle is Sam Cox, born in Kent in 1994, who developed at school a compulsive all-over drawing style — dense, cartoonish, interlocking figures and objects in black line on white — and turned it into a career while still at university in Kent. Videos of him filling rooms, shopfronts and eventually an entire Tenterden house over two years brought an enormous online following and a market that ran hottest in Asia. In 2020 he experienced a severe psychotic episode and was sectioned; he and his wife have since spoken publicly about it, and the episode is now part of how the work is read.

This market moved very fast in 2020 and 2021 and has been volatile since, which makes date of acquisition and documentation more than usually relevant. The output divides into unique paintings — acrylic and marker on canvas — editions of prints and sculpture, and a large volume of collaborative product and merchandise, and the last of these is often mistaken for the second. Telling a canvas work from an edition, and an edition from merchandise, is most of what a valuation here consists of. Certificates and original packaging matter. The drawings are made in permanent marker on primed grounds, and the black lines are vulnerable to abrasion and to light-driven shift over time.

What actually comes to market

Acrylic on canvas leads, in the dense black line on white that is the whole of the work, and the canvases run large. Below them sit the doodled objects — furniture, instruments, sculpture, clothing — which are one-offs and are valued as objects rather than as paintings, and a substantial print output published by the artist himself in editions that run to several hundred.

Almost everything in circulation was bought new within the last few years, because the career is short. That makes the acquisition date and the route in unusually informative: a work bought from a gallery show in 2019 and a work bought from a drop in 2022 are different propositions even when they look alike, and the paperwork is what tells them apart.

Prints, signatures and sheets

The editions are signed, dated and numbered in pencil, and printed and published by the artist rather than by an outside publisher, so the usual publisher's blindstamp is not what confirms one. What matters instead is the pencil inscription, the edition size for that particular image, and the full sheet.

Sheets are frequently trimmed to fit a frame, which cannot be undone and is the single most common avoidable loss on a work of this kind. Photograph the whole sheet square on including its margins, then the pencil signature and number close up, and measure the sheet rather than the frame.

Condition

Black ink on a white ground is the least forgiving surface there is. A fingerprint in a margin, a soft corner, a handling crease across an empty area of white: all of it reads immediately and none of it can be cleaned out cheaply. White grounds also yellow with light, and the change is slow enough that an owner living with the work is usually the last person to see it.

Best auction results

Spring ¥109.25m: Acrylic on canvas, 2019, 213 × 413 cm · Tokyo · 10 August 2020; Publicly reported; About US$1.02m with fees, from the Four Seasons series, and the artist's auction record.
Big Kitty HK$6.3m: Acrylic on canvas, 2019, 200 × 200 cm · Hong Kong · 28 April 2022; Publicly reported; About US$803,000. Estimated at HK$300,000 to 500,000 before the sale, so it closed at more than twelve times the upper figure.

Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.

Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.