I’ve been thinking about increasing my skills to be able to sketchnote for many months now, perhaps even years.

It’s very powerful to see what happens in a meeting room or at a conference when someone has a visual stye of note-taking that combines written notes with drawing to capture the essence of what was said that makes it so much easier to talk to people about those concepts, to be able to show those concepts as well as boost learning, memory and understanding.

I did a little bit of drawing at school but I wouldn’t consider myself artistic. And I was stumped as to how to get better. I’d done two short course with Ben Crothers at General Assembly based on his Presto Sketching work, who is inspirational but I realised that to get better I needed a deeper-dive into setting up the framework for sketchnoting, to see how people draw and to develop a daily practice.

So I signed up for the online video course, Introduction to Visual Note-Taking, by Doug Neill’s site Verbal to Visual and it was a game changer for me. Simple video instruction with lots of homework and structure that has helped me commit to a daily practice.

I have to be honest that this is the beginning of my sketchnoting journey but with Doug Neill’s video course and Ed Emberley’s Make a World drawing book for children I’ve been waking up at 6am every morning to sketch either icons or objects that I can start to incorporate into my day-to-day working life.

In the morning I glance at my calendar and see what meetings I have for that day. I’ll then have a look on noun project or Quick, Draw for icons that represent some of the themes that will come up in those meetings so I can learn to sketch them and start to build my vocabulary.

I’m focusing on personalisation in my job right now so that was the focus of one morning of sketching and I wanted to get better at drawing transport. Although I’m sure the metaphor for the bulldozer could be used in many meetings in many different ways.