Sketchnoting Workshops, Drawing Emotions, and Learning in Public

Issue #11 of Simply Sketched

Live gatherings bring an energy to the learning journey that’s hard to replicate with asynchronous sharing.

As someone who teaches a visual skill like sketchnoting, that’s part of the reason that I moved Verbal to Visual over to the Mighty Networks platform a few years ago, because of the way they blend together community events with complete-at-your-own-pace courses.

Over the past few years I’ve experimented with a variety of styles of live online events, and have come to favor a few in particular. Yesterday I announced the combo of recurring events that I’ll be hosting within Verbal to Visual for the foreseeable future, two event styles that I think will provide some nice momentum for anyone developing their visual note-taking skills:

You can learn more about those events in this post: Online Workshops for Visual Note-Takers.

If you’d like to participate in those live events and also tap into our full library of sketchnoting courses, then come join us!

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One of the areas in which I see the potential for growth in my own visual note-taking skills is the depiction of specific emotions.

A few months back I shared this video in which I create a framework for capturing different emotions, which I think is a helpful starting point:

Recently I was inspired by the work of children’s book illustrator Mo Willems to dive back into that topic. I used his characters from Waiting Is Not Easy! as a reference while drawing facial expressions and body postures that convey a particular emotion:

You can see more of my sketches and read about what I learned from that process in this post: Drawing Faces Like Mo Willems.

By the way, if you’ve got six minutes, go watch Mo Willems: The Joy of of Creation.

Every time I design a character, I ensure that that character is simply drawn enough that a five-year-old can recreate it.

As the name of this publication suggestions, that type of simplicity is something that I shoot for in my sketchnoting work as well.

By the way, who knew that Knuffle Bunny had been turned into a musical!?

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I also wanted to give a shoutout to a few Verbal to Visual community members who recently launched learn-in-public style blogs.

Coralie Renée is sharing how she’s weaving sketchnoting into her coaching work, like in this post about using index cards while developing a new program.

I've started writing on my tablet but I felt like I needed to get to the analog to see the progression of the story... and writing on small post-it like format helped a bit more. I just would like to improve my sketchnote skills so it can be more visual even as I draft it.

I encourage you to check out the work of Maria Palmer as well over on her new blog Picture Pointers. You might enjoy this post about sketchnoting a book to help you remember the ideas within it.

I love it when sketchnoters start sharing their work!

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Finally, here’s a great GIF created by another community member, Alisha Zare, who’s developing a sketchnoting workshop for educators through Grassroots Workshops:

I particularly appreciate the inclusion of what you think as part of the sketchnote.

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Have you come across any interesting visual thinking work lately? If so, share it with us in a comment below.

Best of luck as you continue developing your sketchnoting skills and applying those skills to work that you care about.

Cheers,

-Doug