I suppose the difference between a "doodle" and an automatic drawing lies in the intention. Both somehow reveal aspects of the subconscious and allow one to draw without a specific form in mind. However, whereas doodling can often be a byproduct of boredom, the passing of time, or a simple urge to draw without an aim, automatic drawing is a "conscious" attempt to access the subliminal.
In my personal sketches I tend towards both and now in hindsight I recognize when I had the intention to access my subconscious in search for a message or insight into my state of mind, or when I simply drew in a completely unconscious way, only to "wake up" minutes later and discover I had zoned out all over a random bit of paper.
According to the Wikipedia description of automatic drawing:
Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing whilst physically taking control of the medium's body...
Most of the surrealists' automatic drawings were illusionistic, or more precisely, they developed into such drawings when representational forms seemed to suggest themselves. In the 1940s and 1950s the French-Canadian group called Les Automatistes pursued creative work (chiefly painting) based on surrealist principles. They abandoned any trace of representation in their use of automatic drawing. This is perhaps a more pure form of automatic drawing since it can be almost entirely involuntary - to develop a representational form requires the conscious mind to take over the process of drawing, unless it is entirely accidental and thus incidental. These artists, led by Paul-Emile Borduas, sought to proclaim an entity of universal values and ethics proclaimed in their manifesto Refus Global.
As alluded to above, surrealist artists often found that their use of 'automatic drawing' was not entirely automatic, rather it involved some form of conscious intervention to make the image or painting visually acceptable or comprehensible, "...Masson admitted that his 'automatic' imagery involved a two-fold process of unconscious and conscious activity
I can strongly relate much of this description, especially to this two fold process of unconscious and conscious combined drawing methods. Most often, if not always, I begin a doodle with seemingly random marks or scribbles. This continues for as long as my mind can remain blank and my pen feels the urge to keep moving. The minute of course that my conscious mind starts to think, as if stepping in to take control of the situation, the scribbles pause and I look for patterns or the beginnings of an image. At that point I continue the drawing in an attempt to bring out that image more clearly.
Sometimes I when I use automatic drawing I receive little messages as seen in some earlier posts and in the case in the doodle above this "message" seems almost to forewarn myself about the future in it's text, "Brace Yourself".
Ominous as it may sound, these apparent sneak peeks into the future come as a comfort. Sometimes deep down we can feel the playing out of patterns in life and we know things that we don't always want to consciously acknowledge, but bringing these intuitions to light can ease the stress of uncertainty.
Whether they some drawings are prophetic or not I can't always say. One relating example which comes to mind happened some years ago before while I was living in the US and before I knew I would leave to live abroad. I made a painting using an "automatic" process and produced an image of a figure, guided by another spirit-like being, being sent to a land with desert and mountains in the distance. A year later I was compelled quite suddenly to move to the middle east and later recognized that same mountain range as the view over the dead sea looking onto Palestine. At the time of the painting I had never scene this view nor had I foreseen a life for myself outside the US.
As for psychic drawing as a kind of mediumship, I also touched upon this in an earlier post where I described the process of "tuning into a friend" to make a sketch. This draws back to the point I made in the beginning about intention. Some describe a similar process with channeled writing, and I have attempted to use drawing in a way in which I sit down with the intention to receive a message or tune into someone trying to set my personal ego aside and allow another kind of "inspiration" to guide the process.
Once I sat in on a "pranic healing" workshop where we were asked to partner with someone, sitting back to back from the person. We were given crayons and asked to draw their Aura, or energy field around them. I can't remember what colors my "aura" was suppose to have or if there was any weight to this process at all, but I remember having my doubts. Just the associations with an aura can conjure pictures and colors. It's hard to really put all preconceptions aside (like charka colors, personal favorite colors, or preconceived notions you might have already about someone.)
You never know, however what can come out of this process. The following video is an embarrassing example and it absolutely cracks me up every time I see it.
It's hard to say if she was "picking up" something from him or expressing something deep down from herself!
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