Chapter 14. Spreading Your Wings
WELL, LOOK AT YOU! You’ve taken in a ton of learning, done the exercises, and answered some tricky questions along the way. Hopefully your eyes, mind, and hands have awoken to the amazing potential of visual thinking and visual communication through sketching. And if you were already on that journey, hopefully Presto Sketching has fleshed out those skills even more.
It’s time we part company for now, and it’s time for you take flight with your new turbocharged sketching skills. I want to leave you with some final words about the following:
Looking for opportunity
Trying new things
Getting into the community of visual thinking and communication
Setting yourself challenges
Keep Looking for Opportunity
There’s one thing I always try to instill in everyone who comes along to my sketching classes near the end of each class: it’s you who is in the best place to spot opportunities to use your Presto Sketching skills of visual thinking and visual communication, and it’s you who is the best person to take up those opportunities (Figure 14-1).
Figure 14-1. Find ways of bringing your new sketching skills into your existing job: Before you know it, you could have your sketches on the whiteboard in meetings, in presentations, on your intranet, and in client reports.
It’s unlikely that your boss or your boss’s boss is going to walk up to you, give you a soft, chummy punch on the shoulder and say, “I know we’re all spread really thin on <insert name of hugely important project here>, but why don’t you step out for a few days and work on your sketching skills and confidence instead?”
That’s just not going to happen! Instead, you need to find ways of inserting sketching into your regular work, your regular meetings, and your regular deliverables.
Keep Your Tools (and Your Mind) Sharp
I hope that in reading Presto Sketching, and in doing the various sketching activities throughout these pages, you’ve come to discover (or have a better sense of) the power that sketching gives you to think. I mean, really think.
From here on, you’re going to notice patterns in things that other people don’t. You’re going to see insightful and useful connections in things that others don’t. As technology changes the jobs we do,1 your powers of thinking, critique, synthesis, and sense-making will be sought after more and more.
So, keep your mind sharp! Feed it the right diet of information in healthy proportions. Give it time to relax, reflect, and sift through the barrage of that information. And always sketch. Sketch to think, sketch to relax, sketch to express what your words can’t, sketch to empty your mind, sketch to fill it up again, sketch to delight, sketch to encourage, sketch to uncover uncomfortable truths, and sketch to inspire others.
Try New Materials
The Google Tilt Brush was released just before I began writing this book. It’s the first virtual reality drawing and painting app to give us a fluid, immersive three-dimensional drawing experience. And the first time I used it was another one of those tech mind-blowing experiences! You can even paint in smoke, fire, and snow—just thinking about it now makes me giddy.
As I finish writing this book, Google has updated JamBoard, a 55-inch cloud-linked interactive whiteboard that eight people can draw on at once. I got to play with one recently and marveled at how it has brought several interactions together in one smooth experience. The point is, new technology and new materials are coming out all the time. All these new products will all say that the only limits are our own imagination. But you know what? That has always been the case, from the ochre that our Paleolithic ancestors used to paint the animals they hunted in Lascaux, France, to the Google Tilt Brush.
They are nothing without our imagination.
Having said that, new tools certainly spark new creativity, so keep trying out new materials, new surfaces, new markers, and new apps. The list is endless, but here are a few random ideas:
- Try a dive slate
If you find that you get ideas first thing in the morning while you’re in the shower, why not have something in the shower to capture those thoughts and ideas? Dive slates are basically slates that scuba diver instructors use to write underwater. They’re pretty cheap, and you can get them in a range of sizes from scuba diving stores or online.2
- Try a 3D pen
If you can’t get a VR headset and Google Tilt Brush, why not try something that writes in 3D in real life? Warning: these things are addictive; I have a Lix 3D pen, and I’m having loads of fun experimenting with different kinds of sculptures and subjects.
- Try chalk and a blackboard
You can turn any wall into a hipster blackboard with blackboard paint (it’s pretty cheap and available at most hardware stores). The roughness forces you to draw simple, sketchy, and large—a welcome change if you’re used to always doing persnickety small drawings.
What Next?
Right now, I know you must be bursting with enthusiasm and chutzpah, relishing the idea of striding into a boardroom conversation and bringing awe-inspiring clarity and insight to the cliché-laden work-speak, with a Jedi-like stroke of a whiteboard marker. And so you should be! With that marker in your hand and the wind in your hair, you need to be thinking that there’s no problem you can’t solve, no concept you can’t explain, and no path you can’t chart.
Truly, you can redefine what you do, and the value you bring to the world, if you blend these visual thinking and visual communication skills into the job you already have.
So where to now? Here are a few ideas that have helped me a lot, and I hope they help you.
Get into the Community
As I mentioned in Chapter 13, it’s a great idea to find a community of like-minded sketchers, to learn from them, be inspired by them, and share your work for feedback and advice.
Nothing beats getting together with real humans in real places for this,3 but this is also where the anonymity of being online works in your favor: you don’t need to be afraid of showing anything you sketch online, because most people who see it won’t know you and never will.
I’ve always found that the online community of sketchers—especially on Twitter and Instagram—is incredibly kind and supportive.4 You’ll be amazed at the numbers of likes, hearts, and encouraging comments you’ll receive on posts of your sketches, no matter how raw you think they are. And if you’re lucky, every now and then you’ll forge a real friendship or two, with people from whom you can get honest and useful feedback on your work to make it better.
There are also more official associations that are only too happy to bring you into the fold—such as the International Forum of Visual Practitioners (IFVP) (https://www.ifvp.org)—and websites that are hubs for like-minded individuals, like sketchnotearmy.com.
Set Yourself Challenges
Your Presto Sketching prowess ain’t gonna walk out and get a job by itself: you have to be intentional about developing these skills. The easiest way to get that groove going is to set yourself challenges. They can start small and simple, and grow in effort and reward over time. Here are a few challenges to try:
Challenge yourself to get into the sketchbook habit (if you’re not already). Grab a sketchbook and commit to filling it with sketches, even if you just do 15 minutes a week to build up a cadence of sketching, enough so that it feels natural.
Name your kryptonite, and deal with it. What is your kryptonite when it comes to sketching? What’s the thing that you feel is holding you back? What freaks you out? What makes you nervous, just a little bit? Name it, and take steps to sketch your way out of it.
Add your sketches to your own slide presentations. Even this can be a huge step for a lot of people, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the healthy response you get from your audience.
Sketch the conversation on the whiteboard during a meeting. Rather than tooling around on your phone or laptop like everyone else, quietly begin sketching what you pick up from the meeting around you. Even simple bullet points with the odd arrows connecting one thought with another will really increase everyone’s engagement in the meeting.
Keep your eye out for regular online challenges to be a part of. Popular ones include Inktober (draw something every day in the month of October), 100 drawings (draw something every day for 100 days), London Sketchnote Hangout’s “Icon and Sketchnote Challenge” (commit to sketching an icon for every day of the month according to the descriptions given), and “daily doodle” (post a sketch every day on Twitter or Instagram and tag it #dailydoodle).
The Parting Line
I want to leave you with a quick story.
A while back, I was invited to a class of design students to talk (and sketch) about sketching in design, during one of their lunch breaks. I sketched away, using several examples that you’ve now read about. One of the students in that class was really taken with this style of drawing. The style itself is of course not new; visual note-taking has been around arguably forever, but has become a thing since the mid-2000s.
Anyway, this student began sketchnoting and posting his sketches on Twitter. A longtime friend of his—a teacher—saw these sketches, and thought to himself that he’d like to try it. And try it he did, at the next teaching conference he went to. He just picked it up by himself, and before long he had a lot of others at the conference expressing their amazement and appreciation at what he was doing.
That teacher not only used sketchnoting in his own studies—indeed, it helped him land his next job—but also taught his students to sketchnote. Has their engagement in class increased? You bet it has. Has that teacher been asked back to those same teaching conferences to teach other teachers? Why, yes. Yes, he has.
In case you haven’t picked it up, the student is Justin Cheong, and his interview is in “Interview with Justin Cheong”. His longtime friend is Andrew On Yi Lai, and his interview is in “
Exercise 6-7: Give yourself a hand #2”.
Sketching for visual thinking, visual communication, and synthesis is an amazing key that has the power to unlock not only the solutions to whatever is holding you back, but a better livelihood for you and for those you care about.
This power is real, and it is quite literally in your hands.
So, keep on sketching, and keep on bringing your thinking, your ideas, and your vision out into the world. It needs it!
1 As it always has, whether it’s the Jacquard loom of 1801, or bots and artificial intelligence.
2 AquaNotes waterproof notepads are a similar product. You can write on them without them getting soggy in the shower, but they work like Post-It Notes, so when you’re done you can rip one note off and take it with you. You can find them at myaquanotes.com.
3 A quick search for “sketching” or “sketchnoting” on meetup.com will show you any meet-ups happening near you.
4 Search for others’ sketches using the hashtags listed in “Storing and Sharing Your Sketches” in “High-resolution printing”.