Sketchnote Army Podcast

Jimi Holstebro discusses identifying gaps, pursuing education, and integrating acquired skills into his work. He shares tips on tools, the importance of rehearsal, and not limiting oneself to gadgets. The episode explores visual thinking integration in companies and the evolution of the guest's career as an independent graphic facilitator.

In this episode, Claire Ohlenschlager, an avid doodler, shares how she developed her sketchnoting practice, found a thriving sketchnoting community, and awakened her passion for teaching.Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Claire?Origin StoryClaire's current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find ClaireOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Claire on InstagramClaire on LinkedInClaire on TwitterClaire's Faces WordpressZentangle MethodThe Noun ProjectLettering with FriendsToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Hobonichi A6 Techo PaperTalent PaperUsem Note CardsTWSBI Fountain penSailor Fountain PenPlatinum Pigmented Fountain InkArtline FinelinersCaran d'Adche Coloured PencilPop up Pencil CaseiPadAdobe FrescoProcreateTipsPractice, because with practice, you develop your way of visual thinking. White spaces don't matter. It's not really about the tools, so don't go around buying a whole set. First, try it out before you invest in lots of tools that you are not going to use. Words will help you find the icons and the pictures. Metaphors will help sometimes.CreditsProducer: Alec Pulianas Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with Claire Ohlenschlanger. Claire, it's so good to have you on the show.Claire Ohlenschlanger: Thank you for having me. It's a very honor.MR: Well, I've been trying to get you on the show for a while, and just timing and other things haven't worked out, but we finally have you, and I'm excited. You're someone who's been involved in this community for a long time, and it's always good to hear the perspectives of people who have been in the community for a while.And it might be interesting for us to chat a little bit about that in our discussion too, and see, how does the community remain the same and maybe how has the sketching community changed a little bit? Obviously, we have new people coming in all the time, so that changes the community, which I think is great. But before we get into that, let's first start and let us know who you are and what you do.CO: Well, I'm Claire Ohlenschlanger. I live in the Netherlands in the Hague. A very small country. I work at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where I work at the Teacher Training College, languages department. I've been a teacher, I think this is my 34th year. Secondary education and now higher education.MR: That's really cool.CO: Yeah. I think it's the best job. It's hard work, but very rewarding.MR: Oh, yeah. That's true.CO: Yeah.MR: I really admire teachers. The more that I teach, the more I admire teachers because I see how hard the work is. I enjoy it. It's really satisfying, but it's really hard work, and when you get a really good teacher and you see it, I appreciate it. I know how hard it is to do it well. So, thank you for doing all this great teaching for many years for many different people. I'm sure that people appreciate you for that.CO: I think it's a very—it keeps me young. I was just saying that to my colleague because you work with young people, it kind of keeps me young, I feel, but it's very nice to see people grow and to help them progress and help them when they're kind of stuck. In the pandemic and the years after, a lot of kids have been stuck.MR: Yeah.CO: And so. It's extra challenging, but it's very rewarding at the moment. Very frustrating sometimes as well.MR: I suspect. Yeah.CO: Yeah.MR: So, I'm really curious how—so we know that you're here, you've been teaching for a long time. You've moved all the way through secondary to higher education, but how did you begin? As a little girl, you know, on your own—you do sketchnoting and visualization, right? Probably in your work, but also personally. How did you get here? Starting as a little girl, were you drawing all the time? what's the story and how did you end up where you are?CO: Well, I wasn't really drawing. I was always writing. So I was always making sure that I wrote in nice letters. And of course, I'm from pre-computer, so we had to do all the writing. And I also, as long as I can remember, I would always want to write with fountain pens and not with ballpoints or felt tip pens or maybe sometimes pencils. What I would also always like doing is add color to what I was doing so that what I wrote also looked nice. But not like we sketch these days, but I did spend a lot of time making things nice to read again.I would also do a lot is doodle. I'm not a very good drawer but am an avid doodler. So Lots of my notebooks, I still have a lot of them, have all these little doodles all around what I wrote. Actually, when I started, I couldn't stand messy pages because I would always spend a lot of time on making it—that's what people always say, "How can you write things down straight away, so neatly." But I think that's from when I was very young. I've always been like that. I've never been a drawer. I've developed into a sketcher.MR: Interesting.CO: Very simple.MR: Definitely an interesting perspective. Tell us a little bit more about that.CO: How I came to sketching is I think somewhere around 2010 or so. You know, every so often you have a seven-year itch. And I think I was having a seven-year itch, and then I decided to go back to Uni to start studying again. So I went to do an educational master's. And as it happened, on one of the first evenings after class I was walking home and I passed our bookstore, and our bookstore had a workshop on mind mapping that was just about to start. So I figured I'd sit down.And it was a very practical workshop. So we got a large piece of paper and some pens, or actually I probably had a pen. I always have pens in my bag, so I think I probably had the pens. And then he was telling us about how to mind map, and at the same time I was mind mapping. And that was actually my first-time taking notes of what I was hearing.And that worked so well for me that everything I did in my master's, I started off mind mapping. I mind map everything I heard on my lectures, but also the books and the articles I read. And gradually I found myself needing pictures and visuals. And then of course, I started because I was intrigued by the fact that it was helping me so much to, you know, remember and to retain the information.And while I was getting feedback, people telling me, "Oh, it looks so nice, and can I make a copy of it?" Et cetera. And so gradually, I found myself needing pictures. So I started looking into it, and that's how I came across your book. And then I thought that was really interesting. So then I looked into that, and then gradually I turned my mind maps into sketchnotes.So actually, quite often when I sketchnote, it has the order of a mind map that works from the top to the bottom back up again. And I noticed that the mind maps, how I started this is, I can still find it in my notes. I use a lot of colors and a lot of arrows and what you would do in mind maps. I think it's probably originates from that.When I did Uni, that was also when I was introduced to social media because I'd never even heard of social media. So I had to make a Twitter account to have a personal learning network and, you know, broaden that. So when I found your book, I started looking for you. And then of course I came across hashtags. And that way I got sucked into the community.Today's Doodle, I think Sketchnotes in Real life or Today's Doodle in Real Life, that's how I met Rob, Rob Dimeo, who started off and showed me you could make sketches in actual pictures. In the meantime, I bought an iPad. So I was kind of playing around with that. And that's where I met a lot of the Sketchnote community.And I was also intrigued by that because around that time, a lot of people my age were saying, "Oh, what are you doing on social media? Social media is scary. Lots of ugly things happen on social media." And I was just getting inspiration after inspiration. So that intrigued me as well. And then I started traveling. I like traveling.Then I started thinking, well, I'll just ask who in this community lives in whichever city I was going to. And then I found out that you could also meet up with sketchnoters that you met on internet in real life. And they were actually very nice. And that's right.Where I sometimes try to tell my friends that if you chat with each other and you have a common ground, like sketchnotes in our case, then eventually you also get to know people, you get to see their sense of humor, you see sense of humor in how people draw. Talking about something that you have in common also is binding. So meeting someone in real life then is as if you've known that person for a while.MR: Yeah.CO: That's what I really love about our community. It actually feels like I have friends all over the world. I've met some. You know, I've met you, I've met people at the International Sketchnote camps. I've met people outside of the camps, but in the cities, they live in, or shown people around the Hague here in the Netherlands. And you always have something to talk about. If you don't feel like talking, you always have something to sketch together.That's how one thing grew to another, because at the same time I met McKayla. The McKayla Lewis in London, and somehow James Sorreta in Australia. And we started talking to each other and I started saying, good morning, and good evening, because of course, there's such a huge time difference on my way into work.And that grew into me sketching, because what I always do on my way, on my commute is I also found myself—I have about a 40-minute commute to work by train, and there's a very small lapse, I think it's probably only about a minute, where we're kind of in internet digital no man's land and you don't have internet connection.I honestly think it's only about 10 seconds. But I found myself every time I got into that area, and my phone would not connect, I'd get this kind of feeling stress. And then I thought, that's not really very healthy. So I started taking these little, I don't know whether you remember them when we were in Lisbon? I had these little Usem note cards.MR: Yes.CO: The size of the business card. And I started taking them to school, and I started drawing on those. That's how I got into drawing a doodle a day. I always kind of tend to go overboard. I think I did that for about five days—five years. I switched from the Usem cards to Hobonichi because that paper is fantastic.MR: Beautiful. Yeah.CO: Yeah. So I started sketching my morning, evening for Mackey and James, and I think I also did that for three years every single day. And that turned into a huge box of things that I couldn't never throw away. So that's when I switched to making them digitally because then you can have a digital cupboard.And I did a couple of those with the community. So a couple of times I got to my 1000, or my, I don't know how many and then I thought, "Hey, how cool would it be if we could make one?" I think we even made something for you once.MR: Yeah.CO: I think we even drew you. I really love the way we can connect together. And I really love the idea that we can be all over the world and still be focused on doing the same thing and then make one thing together. That's very, very interesting. And I think it's very motivating. I get a lot of energy from that. So I've done a couple of those kind of projects. Yeah. We drew you in little kind of pixel boxes.MR: That's right.CO: I remember that now. Yeah. And then we made morning, evening together. And I had people from all over the world sending me. And of course, every time I did that, I regretted that I started it because there's always more work than you anticipate when you start off.The idea is always fun, but actually getting it to work is—but then that's a good thing of working at the Uni full of people who understand digital things much better than I do. So I always have someone, a student just who can help me out with all those kind of things.What also happened is, I think also those sketches, because I started drawing on those little, Usem papers, I'd go to conferences or talks or whatever, and then I'd wanted to sketch, and I usually only had those papers. And so, I'd have to sketch very small. And then obviously you can't use too many words. You need the little icons?And then I'd give them. Afterwards I'd take a picture for myself, and then I'd give the cards to whoever it was that was presenting. I also sent a lot of my Usem cards all over the world. I'd make a little happy birthday card, and then I'd tell people, "Give me your address and I'll send it to you."And then I'd get their email address, and I'd have to explain, "No, I mean, snail mail, and I'll send it to your home address." And not many people send you actual cards or anything written in the envelope with the stamp on it these days. So it brings me a lot of positive energy.MR: And I think the people that you share with get positive energy too.CO: Yeah. That's why I hope, yeah. That's why, I hope. And of course, you know, in Uni where I tried to explain—'cause all those mind maps I made during my master's, eventually I laminated them all and I put them together with a binder and they're always at the office.And then every so often when I see kids studying in my hallway feeling slightly frustrated, I take out my binder and I show them and I tell them, "You know, this is also a way for you to retain and to also make it fun. And drawing it makes you remember."You'll always remember, "Oh, yeah, I think it's probably in pink on the right-hand corner." And then you'll also remember, because you thought of an icon, the icon will trigger your memory and it really helps you remember. And yeah, quite a lot of my students try, not all of them persist, but quite a lot of them try and regularly I hear that it really helps them. So that's good.MR: Even if, I would suspect if they still say, type notes, but maybe they use drawings as a support mechanism, that could even be a win as well, right?CO: At the moment I don't teach that much anymore, but when I still did teach, I would actually tell them they had to have a notebook and they would have to take actual old school pen to paper notes. But I don't really like itMR: How did they react to that? I think some have notes.CO: Well, in the beginning, you know, when you start as a teacher, of course kids don't know you, but when you've been somewhere long enough, people already come in with their notebooks because they know.MR: Yeah. Reputation.CO: Yeah. And what also happens is it needs persistence. I remember one of my students a couple of years ago, and of course my students are already around 20 or so, so they're not very—they're still young, obviously, right?MR: Yeah. Yeah.CO: They're not really kids. And it took a lot of patience on my side and persistence. And then I think into the fourth week, he came to me and with a very proud facial expression, he showed me the notebook he had bought and the pen he had bought. And no, that's what he used. Then what I hope is that if they catch the hang of it, then it really helps them.MR: It does seem, you know, I was talking with somebody else about that too, that when you teach any kind of thing, some people will incorporate it into their lives more than others. Some not at all, some quite a bit, and some people in between. So that's just the normal thing, I suppose.CO: I don't think it matters because everyone has their own way, and what you have to do is at least give yourself the chance to find out what your way is, and not find yourself stuck in the computer because that's actually what they start off with. But to give yourself the chance to try out what works for you.MR: Yeah, it's having an option, right? Presenting an option. And maybe that doesn't fit for everyone, but for some people it's perfect, right? So, if you'd never—CO: And then it's up to—yeah, you can go.MR: I was gonna say, if you'd never been exposed to it, you wouldn't know if it works, right?CO: Yeah. That's what I was about to say. I think it's up to you as the teacher to show the different ways that they can actually try to study. Sometimes you tend to get stuck into your own way, into what works for you. But I think as a teacher, you're obliged to show them different ways because you have different kids there.MR: Yep.CO: Yep.MR: An interesting side note that I hadn't planned on, but I'm curious about is, and I have a theory around it is young people, at least that I encounter, seem to have a fascination with old analog things, record players. My son bought himself a turntable and he's buying records. I have a nephew who's really into Polaroid cameras. So, being on a college campus, do you sense any of this sort of an attraction toward analog things?And my theory is that because, you know, our generation, we grew up with all analogs. So digital was really interesting to us 'cause it was a new thing. But I think about this generation sort of steeped in digital stuff, that analog is now the fascinating thing. And so, that becomes attractive for them. Can you speak to that at all?CO: Yeah. I think I noticed that as well. What I also noticed at the moment here in the Netherlands there's this movement that kids aren't allowed to take their mobile phones to school, or at least not use them. What we're hearing back is the kids admitting that it gives them peace not to work with their mobile and not to have it in the vicinity. And that they're finally talking to their friends again and actually also starting to pick up books.I mean, it's still very early, but it's quite interesting to hear youngster saying these things because, you know initially when they started, of course, they were all stressed out that they would be shut outta the world as they know it. And so, it's actually very interesting to hear youngster saying that.MR: Interesting.CO: Yeah, it's interesting. What I do know is that in education, people are promoting taking notes again with pen and paper more so than they've been doing in the past decades, I think. So I think that's a good sign because research shows that that's the best way to remember and to learn and to study. I'm a language teacher, in COVID time, of course everything was digital because we were teaching through computers. And what happened was that when the kids came back, they couldn't write anymore.So they were having a lot of difficulty actually writing their essays because they didn't have the time. And of course, always in a test you have a set time and they weren't used to writing and then having to correct and having to rewrite the whole thing again. Because of course, obviously on the computer, you can copy paste or throw away or add. So that was also very interesting how quickly you also forget.MR: Yeah. It's a lot of practice.CO: You need the practice. So one of the tips I would give is practice, practice, practice. It's not about doing it right straight away. It's copy that makes sure to develop your own style.MR: Interesting.CO: Yeah. I have my stick figure and my stick figure is my stick figure. I think people recognize that it's mine, but it's a stick figure. So it's not really anything very special except my own style is in it for you to recognize it. That's why sometimes you have all these companies that do sketchnotes, and what you see is a lot of the same thing.So here, you know, you have a lot of stick figure for visual note taking, and it's very difficult to see the style of the person who wrote it because it's set in standards of how you draw the stick figures, the coloring, et cetera. And I think in my opinion, the best thing is to do is to develop your own style because the moment it's your own, it's more authentic and more real.MR: Yeah. It's part of you. It's an extension of you.CO: It's part of you. Yeah. It's like you do your pizza or your Packers or whatever you do, you recognize your style is the same, the approach is the same. You know instantly which of you drew the sketch that you're looking at.MR: Yeah. That's pretty fascinating.CO: Yeah. It's like handwriting, but then in sketches.MR: Yeah. It's extended.CO: Yeah.MR: So you mentioned doing Morning and Evening. It sounds like you're not doing that now, or maybe you are, but digitally is there a project that you're working on right now that you would like to share and talk about?CO: No. Well, the little drawings I do, they help me relax. What I notice at the moment is I'm doing a lot of Zentangle things because I'm extremely busy at my work. And it really helps me unwind at the end of the day. It helps me focus on something completely different and it really relaxes me before I go to sleep so that I don't go to sleep with all these hectic work-related thoughts on my mind.MR: Yeah. Yeah.CO: I'm busy. I've got another project going with all kinds of different Zentangles. So it's something completely different. And I think the interest is, you know, when I contemplate on what I do is I'm not a specialist in anything. I tend to do lots of different things. I always like projects and I try to look at different things to do. So I'm an extremely creative person in a huge variety of creativity.MR: Interesting.CO: I do a lot of picking up, you know, Mackey would say rubbish. Picking up rubbish from the ground and then I make something. I make a little figurine from that. In COVID time, what kept me going was going on walks. So I'd pretend to go to work at the beginning of the day and pretend to go home at the end of the day. And then I take pictures and that developed into all these pictures, and then I make collages of whatever it is I see. Sketchwise, I think at the moment it's the Zentangles that I'm doing. You have Inktober, so I like to do something for a whole month, the same kind of thing. And then it gives you a nice collection.MR: Yeah.CO: Yeah.MR: Interesting. I know a little bit about Zentangle. I think it's fascinating. And we'll put a link in the show notes for anyone who's never heard of it before to look at it. It's really cool. It's really cool.CO: It's very meditative. Yeah.MR: It's some crossover between sketchnoting—it is a visual practice, but it's very personal, I think. And the way to kind of get thoughts out of your head as you talked about.CO: Yeah. And the personal thing is somehow in everything I do, all kinds of art things, I always need words. So I always think of words and I like incorporating words or a sentence into whatever it is I'm doing. And this morning I was thinking, I'm going to try a Zentangle that incorporates a word into it or something. I think that's probably also my personal thing because otherwise Zentangle they can look alike. So I'm looking at how can I make my own Zentangle signature or something like that.MR: Something of a crossover.CO: Yeah. Yeah.MR: Interesting.CO: Yeah. Yeah.MR: Well, you know, one of my memories doing something creative with you, you mentioned Lisbon, is when I reached out to you and said, "Hey, let's do a workshop on lettering."CO: Yeah.MR: And that was so much fun, right? We got a little projector and we each kind of presented our different ways of doing things. And encouraging people to say like, "You know, Mike does it this way, and Claire does it this way. They're just inspirations for you to do it your way. These are some starting points."CO: And we did them on the Usem cards.MR: On those little cards. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.CO: It doesn't have to be huge. It can be small and it can be yours. And we did coffee, we did the cards with the coffee and told people to make their own cards around coffee.MR: Right, right. We'll have to link to those cards too, for someone to find them, so.CO: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the international camp, and of course, the international camp is also great the way that came into existence and how people meet there as well.MR: Yeah. Yeah. If you're listening and you are curious about it, we have interviews, I think with every organizer of the event past seasons. But basically, it was four women in Germany who decided—CO: Yeah, Exactly. Yeah.MR: - they wanted to make something happen, and they just—that's the way the community is. Someone just decides we're gonna do it. Kinda like Claire and I decided, "Hey, let's do a thing on lettering." Like no one gave us permission. We just decided, right? So I think that community mindset is all through, and anybody that comes into the community feels that, and I think that's really empowering to feel like you can do it.CO: It reminds me of in COVID time we did the sketchnote on location museum visits.MR: Yes, I remember that.CO: Yeah. That was also so cool. And sometimes, I mean, I don't want a pandemic ever again, but somethings that happened in the pandemic were very cool.MR: Yeah. It showed that you can be creative. Yeah.CO: I remember here we had the first signs of COVID happening in Italy. And I thought the Marro and Mario, and I felt sorry for them. So I sent a couple of the community members a message saying, "Shall we send Marro and Mario a positive message every morning?" And I gathered all these messages not knowing that we were actually going to be in the same situation as they were, because I just thought it would stay isolated in poor old Italy and not to reach us. But then of course it did.You can send out a question like that and people actually want to participate and then they also participate. If you have a lot of people, some people had to wait for 20 days, and then they actually wait, and on their day, they post something.MR: They're excited. Yeah.CO: Yeah, yeah. I really like that. I really like that. It also brings me to, at the moment, with everything that's going on Twitter, I feel like our community is quieter.MR: Yeah, I think so.CO: At least. Yeah. YeahMR: It's spreading out a little bit. You know, we have a Slack channel for Sketchnote Army, which you can of course check out. I know there's other people that are creating private chat areas and I think probably individuals are probably chatting with each other, but I think there is—maybe that could be an encouragement for this year is find some way, some public place. I think it's maybe moved to Instagram to some degree, but, you know, it's more visual there, it's not—CO: It's a bit different.MR: Yeah. It's different.CO: It's not about the conversations. On Twitter, you could wake up in the morning and you had 89 messages or something like that. In Instagram you don't have—maybe you have—also, I'm on Slack, but—MR: It's different.CO: You also have that on—it's different somehow, but, and maybe it's also digital fatigue after pandemic.MR: Could be, yeah.CO: That's also quite possible that people need detoxing from the digital world.MR: Yeah. There's quite a lot of dynamics involved probably, I suspect.CO: Yeah. Yeah.MR: You know, talking about the International Sketchnote Camp, it's happening in 2024 in Texas, the details aren't available yet 'cause Prof. Clayton, who's organizing is still working out details. But he's a professor of a university in Texas, in San Antonio. It would be centered around San Antonio.An opportunity for maybe some Europeans to make it to the states and see that and have some great barbecue of course and tacos and the things that are unique to San Antonio and Texas. So as we get more information, we'll of course post that. If you haven't been to one of those, especially if you're in the U.S., this would be a great opportunity for you to come to it.CO: Yeah, I think especially if you're in the U.S. because they've all been here in Europe. I can imagine that people in the U.S., It's a lot of money of course, that you have to spend. If it's in the U.S., it's closer to home, but it's such a nice experience. It reminded me of, you know, when I was at school as a kid, he would go on weeks with your class and you'd have fun—MR: School trips. Yeah.CO: - doing silly things and laughing your heads off and having, you know jaw pain and stomach aches because you laughed too much.MR: Laugh so much. Yeah.CO: Yeah. Yeah.MR: You don't want it to end, you know, at the end of this time.CO: And sing together and dance together, and when you get older, maybe sometimes you feel like you can't behave that way anymore, but it's—MR: We do.CO: I remember when we were here in Leiden, the last day we danced and sang and it's so much fun. It's so much fun. I mean, I always think never grow up. And sometimes it's good to have that feeling and to just laugh out loud.MR: Yeah. places where you can be yourself.CO: Yeah. Laugh out loud to silly things that you can't describe to people who weren't there. Very difficult to describe to people who weren't there. So I would tell my colleagues and you know, people who haven't been there and who don't know that, I think they don't understand why it's so much fun, but it's a lot of fun.MR: Yeah. It is. Definitely it is.CO: Yeah. It's hard work for whoever organizes it.MR: Yeah. But, you know, it's for the community, so there's satisfaction in delivering it to the community. That's what I've noticed in all the organizers when they're done, they feel tired but it's like a good tired when you do something of meaning and you're tired for a good reason. That's the kind of feel that they often have.CO: Yeah. And definitely, I mean, how cool is it to see people enjoying themselves over something that you organized.MR: Yeah. Super satisfying.CO: Yeah. yeah.MR: So, we'll have more information on the Sketchnote Army page when that's officially announced, which I think should be relatively soon. I won't speak for Prof, but maybe by the time this recording comes out, it'll already be announced. I dunno. We'll see.CO: Yeah.MR: So you mentioned you mentioned these little cards, and that reminds me to talk to you about your favorite tools. You mentioned too that you do digital. But let's first talk about analog tools since we're old school and we love our analog tools. What are your favorite pens? You talked about these cards. Are there notebooks that you like? Any other stuff that you use that you can share with us that maybe might inspire someone to try something new?CO: I'd say Hobonichi is number one. Hobonichi paper is perfect. I always like the small sizes, so the A6, Techo. These days I use Talens. It's a Dutch brand. Which is very nice paper, but not so much if you're writing with a fountain pen, which I like. And then Fountain pen-wise I like TWSBI. TWSBI has a very nice pen point. And I really like extra fine. I don't really like the medium. I always like writing an extra fine. And then the extra finest is a Sailor Fountain pen.So fountain pen. And then I use I think it's—now I can't remember the—but anyway, the watertight ink in the converter in my fountain pen. I don't remember the make anymore. Diplomat ink. And then for using fineliners yeah, recently I've been using Art Line. I picked up an Art Line, I think on—I'm not sure, at a sketchnote camp sometime, maybe even in Portugal. So I don't remember. And they're very—now, I used to use Uni Pin, I think it was called Uni Pin.MR: Yep. I've used those.CO: Actually I'm using Art Line a lot. And they're very water tight. They're actually really black-like.MR: Nice.CO: And some of the pens, if you press too hard, the tips kind of disappear into the pen.MR: Squish.CO: Yeah, yeah. That doesn't happen with those. And then I like using colored pencils and then have to think what's—oh yeah, Carand'ache.MR: Okay. French.CO: And then the watercolor pencils because you can—MR: You can put some water on them.CO: Watercolor pencils are really good colors. If you press hard, they're actually very dark. I don't know how you say that.MR: Yeah, intense. Yeah.CO: Intense colors. Yeah.MR: And then I think you can use water to spread them too as well.CO: You can use water. Yeah. And so, those are the things I use most. And then you have the Usem cards. The sad thing is the guy who made the Usem cards and sold them, et cetera, he passed away last year. So they're looking for someone to take over his business. So it's down for the moment, but I'd still share the—because they're working on, you know, someone else doing it.MR: Keeping it going.CO: It probably be up again. Yeah. I like using small, and so like what I'm doing now is, what I do is I have these little—MR: Oh, I can see them.CO: A little gift tag.MR: Yeah, like a price tag or something.CO: Yeah. And then a little gift tag. And then I tie them together, and then I put that in my coat pocket. And then sometimes I just take them out, and then I always have a pen in my coat pocket and a little packet of those.And then I just sketch or Zentangle, or write a word that I want to remember or whatever. And on my holidays, what I've been doing is these little wooden pegs, and then I sketch the name of wherever it is I'm visiting, and I put those in all my pictures.MR: Oh, nice.CO: That's how—yeah. And then digital. So I have an iPad Pro. I tried working with the Remarkable for my notes at work but it didn't work. I need paper. I need to feel paper, I need to feel the flow of my fountain pen on the paper, and I need to be able to color in with red or wherever in my lettering. And Remarkable doesn't do colors so Remarkable was a bit boring. And iPad is too smooth to do that. I tried the sticker thing on top, but also so—MR: Still wasn't enough. The paper—CO: Still it wasn't enough. I like writing on paper, but when I do my sketches—so I do a lot of sketching for all kinds of educational things here in the Netherlands, and I do those on my iPad. And when I'm sketching as a sketchnote, I usually use Adobe. I think it's called Fresco.MR: Yes.CO: It used to use Pro, but it changed. I'm still kind of getting used to Fresco because things work a bit differently. And when I'm doing a more kind of artistic look to it, then I use Procreate.MR: Okay. 'Cause of the brushes they have available of course.CO: Yeah. They have different kinds of brushes and blurring and they have so many possibilities that I think Fresco's a bit harder. It looks like writing on paper more than Procreate. Can also look that way, but it also does a lot of as if you're using a brush or whatever.MR: It is interesting that these—CO: In the more artistic way.MR: - tool has a field to it, right? You know?CO: Yeah.MR: Great. Does feel like it's made for making art.CO: Yeah, exactly. And I used to do a lot on my phone just with my finger, and I used to draw on my phone, but since I have my iPad, I usually have my iPad in my bag. Also, I have a far too heavy bag. I'm always carrying around everything. And then I have, you know Diana's little pencil case?MR: Yeah. Yeah.CO: And it always starts off relatively flat and empty. And then within a week it's far too full. And then my bag gets heavier and heavier and I have to empty and sort it all again.MR: Reset. We have to reset.CO: And then I'm sure you recognize I have far too many pens, but I'm still always able to find a pen that I really need and I can't do without, and then I just have to get it. So, when I was in Jordan a couple of weeks ago, and we arrived on the December 31st at 11:00 p.m. And right across the street of our hotel was a little pen shop—MR: Oh, nice.CO: - which was open on December 31st at half past 11 at night. So I had a stroll around that. And of course, had to buy two little pens, which I really needed.MR: Of course.CO: Probably not, but still.MR: You can rationalize anything, right? Yeah.CO: Yeah. Yeah.MR: That's great. That's great. Well, we'll have to make sure and put links into the show notes, especially Diana's pencil case. The standup pencil case. So we'll find that link as well.CO: Diana pencil is really good.MR: Yeah. So now let's shift into the tips section. So this is where I frame it as, imagine someone's listening or watching, they're visual thinker of some kind. Maybe they feel like they've reached a plateau, or they just need a little bump of inspiration, what would you tell that person in three tips?CO: Well, I think I'd start off with practice. And because with practice, you develop your own way of visual thinking. 'Cause It's about paper layout. When you start, you want to have an idea of how you're going to place things on paper, which also I think brings me to that white spaces don't matter.When I started, I would put everything together. And it would kind of intertwine 'cause sometimes you want to add a picture or a word, or you want to tie it together with a border or with a color or whatever. I think another tip would also be don't be afraid of white spaces because in the end, what you do is you finish it off and you'll notice that those white spaces won't matter.You also need a bit of peace and quiet in your sketch. If it's too full, it's too much. And if you're able to work in quiet spots in your sketch, I think it's also good to have a bit of peace of and quiet on your paper or in your notes.And I think with all the talking about tools, et cetera, It's not really about the tools because like I was saying about my students, I think you have to try, and then you try different tools, and then you work out that, you know, you prefer the 0.1 over the 0.8 pen or the other way around. And whether you prefer the Caran d'Ache over Stabelo pencils or whatever.And it's not really about the tool, so don't go around buying whole sets. Start off with one. You know, usually you can also buy one color of a certain pen or a certain pencil. First try it out before you invest in lots of tools that you're not really going to use. And that's why I also think of buying a whole box of pencils or a whole box of felt tip pens or whatever colors, there's a lot of colors you're never going to use.MR: Right.CO: Yeah. So it might feel like it's more expensive to buy the single pencil, but in the end, if you're only going to be using three of the colors of a whole box in these days, you know, you'll have to think about not wasting too much. Yeah.MR: Cool. Those are—CO: That would be—I don't know, did I say things in pictures? I'm not sure whether I said that already.MR: That can be number four, I guess. Yeah.CO: I do drawings for educational meetings. And then they'll have a theme. And then I always find myself saying is if they have a theme for one of their evenings, they have a title. The title is usually very general. So I find myself always asking them, what kind of words do you think of within your theme? And those words will help you find the icon and the pictures and metaphors will help sometimes as well. And that reminds me that a good link would also be is the Noun Project.MR: Yeah.CO: Yeah. The Noun Project is where, if you have a word, you can type it in and it gives you all kinds of digital drawings that people have made little icons, and not that you use them, but they are good for inspiration for what you can use in your drawing yourself or in your sketch. So I use that a lot as well with the Noun Project. Yep.MR: That's great. Those are great tips. We have four good tips and solid ones that you can apply right away. Thank you.CO: Good.MR: So tell us, Claire, what's the best way to reach you? A website, social media, if someone would like to follow your work and reach out and say hi.CO: I think I'm most active on Instagram. So that would be #claire_ohl. My name Ohlenschlager, that's far too long. And that's where I post a lot, it's not everything. And of course, I don't post the notes I take at work anymore.MR: Right.CO: In my profile, I have the link to a WordPress called Claire's Creativities. I haven't updated those. But if you look in that, then you see—well, I just described that I'm very diverse. I'm not a specialist, so I do lots of things. And then you'll see all kinds of things I do that aren't necessarily sketch noting, but still recognizably me. So, yeah.MR: That's great. That's great. Well, we'll definitely put that in the show notes as well. So if you wanna see her work or reach out and say hi, you can certainly do so.CO: Yeah. I'll let you know the names, I'll send them to you just to be sure, the names of my pen and my notebook.MR: Yeah, for sure. We'll get that to make sure we put those in the show notes. Perfect.CO: Yeah. Well, Claire, thanks for being on the show. More importantly, thank you for being part of our community. Thanks for being a leader, for being so welcoming and caring and connecting. You're another part of this community that's connected us together. So thank you for your contributions. I really appreciate you and the work you've done, because you've made a lot of people's lives better. Thank you.CO: Thank you very much, Mike. Very kind words. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me, and thank you for being my inspiration, because that's what you're, and I'm sure you're to many other people in our community.MR: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that as well.CO: Yeah. Yeah.MR: Well, for anyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon.

Pierpaolo Barresi, founder of Yobi Scribes, discusses blending business objectives with creativity through art and games. They explore analog and digital tools for creative projects and share tips on visual design. The conversation also delves into personal inspiration sources and the journey from diverse studies to team leadership in graphic facilitation.

Alina Gutierrez discusses her journey from banking to graphic facilitation, emphasizing the impact of visuals in communication. She gives tips on starting in visual note-taking, tools to use, and the importance of setting realistic goals.

Alejo Porras shares his journey of personal growth through embracing challenges and balancing career, coaching, and fatherhood. He emphasizes the power of effective communication, self-kindness, and cultural understanding in sales and personal interactions. The podcast explores the rewards of stepping out of comfort zones, maximizing opportunities through visual summaries, and making a positive impact on others' lives.

Maggie Appleton shares her journey into AI tool design and digital gardening. Discussion on living in the AI era positively. Concepts sponsorship for sketchnoting. Maggie's work, tips, and tools shared. Experiments with GIFs and interactive essays. Community acknowledgment and support.

Jono Hey, the visual thinker behind Sketchplanations, champions the perfection of first drafts and advocates for simple visuals. Designer Elizabeth Chesney emphasizes that sketchnoting lacks a single standard and encourages yearly playbooks for inspiration. Rev Andy Gray highlights the importance of practice and the efficiency of minimal wording. Ashton Rodenhiser empowers beginners to embrace their unique styles, while Gary Kopervas stresses the significance of regular sharing to overcome creative blocks. Together, they offer a treasure trove of sketchnoting wisdom!

In this episode, Gary Kopervas shares how drawing and writing freed his imagination and got reactions from others. He’s built on his early skills to become a cartoonist, copywriter, creative director, and brand consultant. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Gary KopervasOrigin StoryGary Kopervas's current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find Gary OutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Gary's LinkedInGary's FacebookGary's InstagramGary's WebsiteBrainstorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James MacanutoOut on a Limb cartoonsKing Features SyndicateToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Vellum Bristol paperCopic markersPaper Mater Flair markersTipsDo something and share it.If you want to learn something, draw it because you have to process the information to understand it.Share your work with people who inspire you, you never know where all that interaction might lead.Get on someone else's radar.CreditsProducer: Alec Pulianas Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Gary Kopervas. Gary, how are you doing?Gary Kopervas: I'm doing really well. Mike, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.MR: Yeah. Did I say your name right, Kopervas? Is that the right way to say that?GK: That is spot on.MR: Really.GK: And that doesn't always happen, so I appreciate that.MR: Yeah. Well, I just came back from Holland, so I've been aware of very unusual names, and trying to pronounce them, that was about a month ago, end of August, early September.GK: I think everyone who's been mispronouncing my name, I should ask them to make a visit and bone up on the pronunciation because I often get the "coppervas" as in the metal or the copper. So, appreciate that.MR: Yeah, not a problem. I always try to make sure I say the name right at least. At least that's the one kind thing I could do for somebody. But let's get into a little bit about you. We've crossed paths because I think we ran across each other on LinkedIn and I really liked your stuff, I think you liked my stuff, we got chatting and I said, you know, "You'd be a really good candidate for the podcast 'cause of the work you're doing." And I'm always trying to push the boundaries of who I talk with to go more toward the edges, so.GK: And I think we have some people in common who introduced—you know, I was aware of your work prior to that, but some people have talked about the podcast and I think we have them in common. So that helped facilitate today. So I'm grateful for that too.MR: Yeah. Now that I think back, there was someone who recommended you, I'm trying to remember who it was that recommended you, but I'd have to.GK: Martha.MR: Martha, yes, of course. Yeah. So, once I saw your work, then that totally made sense. So, I'm glad. Thank you, Martha, if you're listening.GK: Yeah, and I think she will. So she'll be happy for that.MR: She's a pretty dedicated listener. I do know that.GK: Yes.MR: Well, why don't we get right into it? Why don't you tell us a little bit of who you are and what you do, and then jump right into your origin story? How did you end up here? You can go back all the way to when you were a little kid if you want to. I just love the origin story 'cause it tells me so much about the person and what motivates them.GK: Yeah, that's very true. As far as today, I guess I would describe myself as really a cartoonist turned, copywriter, turned creative director, turned brand consultant. It has been an evolution and not really stopping something and starting to do something else, it was always continuing to do what I did in the early days which we can talk about.But it started to evolve it to to the career that I was in. And I went from college to advertising agencies. I live in New Jersey and started in New York. And just to answer your question of who I am Gary Kopervas, and then I'm all those things that I just mentioned. I grew up in East Coast, so advertising was always something that I wanted to do. Growing up, there was this great television show called "Bewitched."MR: Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. I watched "Bewitched" all the time.GK: She was a genie out of a bottle, you know, I think it was a documentary, I'm not sure, but she was a genie—oh, no, a witch. Sorry about that, that's actually not a genie.MR: Bewitched, yeah.GK: Bewitched. She was a witch, Elizabeth Montgomery, a cute witch and married to an advertising executive. So it was always like, man, I have to look into this advertising thing because it was always creative and it was always, you know, Darren creating these cool campaigns. And then his wife, the witch, would always splash it up with something really cool and amazing and Darren would get all the credit, you know, for being so creative.So, you know, it was a sitcom when you're a little kid, but I just thought this advertising seems like it might be a good thing which did dovetail into I guess an origin story, is that I was a quiet kid. I just didn't talk a whole lot. But I found at some point writing and drawing and playing the guitar became really great forms of self-expression for me. So I started to just you know, write stories and comics. I grew up around, "Mad Magazine" and "Marvel Comics."I had a mom, like many moms who saved a lot of things, and I would see there's elaborate stories of things that I had written and illustrated. So the cartooning thing was really a great thing for me because it just allowed me to, at some level, make sense of the world around me. I didn't write journals per se, but I kept pretty good—maybe unconsciously at that age, but I would always draw what I was into and draw what I was interested in. And to look at it years, years later, it was always amazing.One of the examples, and I still laugh about that was parent-teacher night. The teacher said to my mom, is like, "Oh, we asked the kids to draw something that they like, you know, a house, maybe a Turkey made out of their hands, some cotton and clouds." And I brought into class the illustrated, as best I can, the parody of The Godfather from "Mad Magazine" by Mort Drucker. You know, just painstakingly drawing Sonny Corleone, and my mother was like, "Wow, all the other kids had, like, you know, houses and trees and yellow suns, and you came in with the Godfather parody."And they kept an eye on me for a little while, but it was just an example of us fascinated by getting lost into writing words and drawing pictures. But the true origin story goes back maybe a little bit further, but like most, and looking at your wall, it's fun to see and reminds me of superheroes and Marvel. And like most kids that are, you know, six, seven years old Superman and Batman, maybe Captain America or Thor. And I would draw them which was really great for things like anatomy and drawing just what human beings look like. And that was fun.But in drawing that, I like many kids wanted to be Batman. Batman was really a fun thing, and I would have stuff on walls, but there was a period of about a year or two when I can't explain it, but that's how the culture works, is I really got excited about Zorro. Do you remember Zorro?MR: Yeah.GK: Zorro was the swashbuckling—MR: He left a Z, and when he would fight crime or whatever, right?GK: And I thought that was a cool thing. So me being a quiet guy and using drawing and writing to express myself when I was around that same age, six or seven, I thought it would be like a really cool idea that on one rainy day, I did have a Sharpie, maybe it was my first experience with Sharpies, where I put Little Z's under the furniture in my family's living room furniture.So I thought it was cool, I had Z's all underneath, you know, put under various pieces of furniture until my mother did see that and said, "Come here a minute. What gives on all this furniture, there's little Zs under our living room chairs. What's with the Zs? Did you draw the Zs? "And I want to remember it this way, I'm not sure if it actually happened, but it was like, "Mama, I really didn't draw those Z's. Zorro did. I had nothing to do with it." After talking to and probably a grounding, I realized, "Do not deface furniture with Z's." But at a very young age, I found there was something really interesting about drawing and writing and letting your imagination run, and to get a reaction from people.What I think it did, is it allowed me to build confidence, you know? 'Cause I was quiet and played sports and did things like, you know, hung out with friends in the neighborhood. But I think I started to find, "Hey, I'm actually okay at this. I can write and I can draw, and I usually get reactions outta people. Not always favorable, you know, with the whole Zorro thing. But it was an opportunity to express.And I followed that into jobs and started to shape this idea that I was very visual, but also wrote, so sort of a left hand, right hand. Then what sealed it for me was, to follow this little arc of an origin, I was in high school like many, and in a chemistry lab in high school, maybe 10th-grade 11th-grade. Maybe it was a bio lab. And it was a three-hour lab, and the teacher was, I still remember him, he was a really serious guy.And I remember wearing earth shoes, and he wore his pants really high, and he had a beard with no mustache. So I couldn't help but say, man, he sees really sort of a comic character. So it was an afternoon of learning about the Doppler effect, about the little dropping of balls into the water and the rings of things, which is, you know, pretty important at the time.And it was long though, for me. My mind started to just wander in my hand and my imagination. So I started to, in my notebook draw a picture of this teacher talking about the Doppler effect. And it was a bit of a caricature, but it was taking something he said about the Doppler and, and drawing it.And a neighbor nearby said, "Lemme see that. That's funny. That's really funny." So I started this, a Doppler effect of distraction in this classroom where people grab the notebook and passed it. All of a sudden I realized it was getting away from me. And people laughed and they're like, "Oh, man, this is—" And as teachers often do, they pick up on that right away. And he saw about three rows away from me, saw disruption.So he walked over and he looked at, "Hold on one second. May I see this?" And he saw the picture that I had drawn, and with this little scenario, and in a poker face, didn't say much, and he said, "Oh, who did this?" And I was like, "Uh-oh this is gonna top my Zorro experience. This is like, serious now." So he came over and I heard this little earth shoe squeaking, you know, as he made his way through the rows. 'Cause people were like, "Who drew this?" And people gave me—MR: They kept pointing backwards. Yeah.GK: — people gave me up. I still remember, walked up to the side of me, you know, and I was just playing it cool. And he looked down and he said, "Did you draw this?" And he put the notebook in front of me. And I was like, "What am I gonna say?" I was like, "Yeah, I did do that." And I was expecting, oh no, I'm outta here. I'm gonna probably go somewhere, someone's office. And he looked at it and he goes, "So you did this?" I said, "Yeah, I did this." And he goes silence. It was like two seconds. And I thought, "Oh, it's just boiling up. This is not gonna go well."MR: It's getting worse, yeah.GK: He goes, "Could you add color to this? And I wanna put it in the frame and give it to my wife." And I just thought, "That did not go the way I thought it would go."MR: No.GK: He said, "This is so funny. I would love if you can just maybe pull it out and clean it up and put some color in it. And I like to give it to her for fun in a frame." And I realized at that point, the reactions that you can have, even in the most, you know, unexpected places of just an idea and a visual be it comic or just a diagram or what have you, that just captures people. And I just thought, "This is starting to get interesting."And then from there, I went into to college and studied business thinking, advertising, and then got into creative departments. And then it's been that trajectory ever since. So it's funny though, those early stories, the early days led up to what had been, you know, a pretty, pretty long career now.MR: Wow. Yeah. It prepared you in some ways to be ready. I love that you're channeling the spirit of Zorro to your mom, right?GK: Oh.MR: I guess she probably was thinking like, "Well, at least he drew it on the bottom of the furniture," right?GK: He said, "Maybe he was thinking a little bit." But it was on the bottom. I don't know the mental process then, but it was so important that I did not do the top. And I think it was that you know, Zorro had that little mask, and he was sort of mysterious, so he didn't wanna go over the top. That was one of my early memories of that whole creativity.MR: Wow. One of the first taggers, I guess Zorro. I never thought of it that way.GK: Yeah. At least Sharpies could rub out and wash out if you wanted it to, but Zorro went right into the wood.MR: He would cut into there. Yeah.GK: He would cut into the wood. So I wasn't completely Zorro, so, but they were forgiving, thankfully.MR: Yeah. And as they were on the bottom. Yeah. That's really cool. I love the story about the teacher as well, you know, because we have had a fair amount of teachers on this show, and they really embrace visualization. It seemed like this teacher was open enough to do the same and see the value. Like, wow, he really was. I would think any teacher that walked up and saw that, leave aside the humorous drawing of him, which he enjoyed, right? It worked out that he enjoyed it.GK: Yeah.MR: You were paying attention, right? You were capturing information and the stuff he was telling you, you were receiving it, right? That's a reflection of what you received, so.GK: And that's a really good point. And I hadn't thought about it before, you know, trying to pull out what maybe would become mechanics of some sort that I would do later. But I was listening to Doppler and I had him in some context that said, "Oh, I heard you, but I'm just gonna interpret it."And I think that's what, whether it's either sketchnoting or even workshops that I often do is I'm hearing what comes out or comes from and then quickly interpreting it and putting it into somewhat of a visual context, as, you know. And just isn't solely reporting what you hear. It's not like it's a court stenographer or something. It's interpreted and enhanced so it's more memorable and sometimes even more entertaining, you know?MR: Right. And you're often connecting—I find myself connecting dots, like it may be unsaid, but there's a connection between these things that as I look at it, these have impact on each other, or one doesn't exist without the other. And you can visually connect those things, which could be pretty interesting. Maybe you did that as well in the work you did. I think the other thing too, as an a scientist, right? So he was a scientist.GK: Yes.MR: His whole job is observation. You have to be a good observer of what happens and then document it. You did all those things. You were observing him. You're almost, as though he were a monkey in a zoo or something, and you're observing like all the details.GK: Yeah, that's true.MR: And then, you're capturing what he was saying, and on top of it, and putting it in context. I'm curious, did you ever hear back from him, what his wife thought of your drawing? Did you get feedback on that frame drawing?GK: I did. And it was a hallway because I remember it was, and I still had another year. I think it was like a junior year, I was still there around for a year. But he was a tough teacher grade-wise, but he did have a bit of a sense of humor. And it was almost like Catskills kind of humor where, you know, I think I hit a nerve, and he might've been like, "I don't see that here often." So it was a bit of a surprise.And I think probably the following year, my senior year, and oftentimes if I remember correctly, a lot of teachers would hang out in the hall or near their classroom and welcome. I remember walking down the hall towards him and we made eye contact, and he was just like—MR: I remember you.GK: He did a little bit of the De Niro from his movie, "You, you, just wanna tell you, I gave it to my wife around Valentine's Day or whatever it was." And he goes, "She loved it. Now, she'll never let me forget about how high I wear my pants." So he even had a bit of self-effacing humor and order to just want me to just tighten it up so he can give it to his wife.And I think we had in a way a bit of a connection there where he was grateful, but still maintaining his teacher status. But we had a moment in the hallway the following year where I walked away feeling pretty good. Oh, I kind of probably forgot about it, but it made me feel good. Other kids in my class, yet again, kind of quiet guy. And I find there's a little bit of a relationship of sometimes the quiet guys, the instigator.As they say, "You gotta watch the quiet guy, you don't know what he's up to. " And it was a moment where people remembered that and said, you know, that it was fun and they remembered it years after. It's like, "Hey, how about that lab class, you remember that?" "Yeah, that was funny."MR: Gary, the mastermind.GK: Yeah.MR: Talking about all that, so obviously you went to school and you ended up in, you talked about cartoonist copywriter, creative director, and now brand consultant. I'd be interested to hear the—it sounds like you didn't really stop doing the one thing. You just layered things on top, right? So you built all those things into the way you operate. Tell us how those things layer and what does that look like now that you're a brand consultant? How do those different parts come into what you do?GK: And that's a great question. And it was a little bit of that. I'd started out as a junior writer at different agencies. One was in New York, and then I wound up going out to the Midwest. And so you're just doing what you're told and, you know, you're writing for whatever clients you were working on. I found myself—and this was years before even knowing what sketchnoting was, or people actually did it.I was in many meetings, lots of meetings, and some boring meetings. And there were times when we didn't all work on our laptops, which was a little bit like, "Geez, I don't know why I wish I knew at that point." We all wrote in notebooks and things, so, we would often sit in, you know, circles or semi-circles and just notes and say, "Hey, let's take a break and we'll come back in 10 minutes."And oftentimes, people would go by and in matter of casually walking by and look at my notebook, and it was just organized differently. Everyone else had the same notes taken the same way they took it back in high school and in their biology classes, just that everyone's notes looked identical. But in that 90-minute meeting, they would look at mine and go, "What kind of going on here? What is this? What are doing? You should be paying attention. Your notebooks should all look like everyone else is." It just didn't process that way.My mind would work, as I often described it, in sound bites and snapshots. As the information came out an image would pop into my mind, and all of a sudden I would just doodle, a lot of doodling. I would doodle an image and then write what I heard around it. And they were just little episodic sketches during a 90-minute meeting. And people will be like, "How do you do that? How can I do that? Because I wanna take a guess and say, I'm gonna remember yours a little bit more."So it's that idea again, of verbal visual working together. And I got somewhat known for amongst clients and creatives of that odd note-taking style. And then, and then the progression said, "Hey, we have a large meeting where we're gonna do a whiteboard, or we're gonna just put your paper up on the wall, could you just track notes and can you stand up and do that?" And I was like, "I think I could do that. I mean, I haven't, but I'll put my notebook aside and grab a couple of these markers, and sure let's do it.And I started to do that in a larger scale at meetings, and I noticed people would take their phones out later on, people actually took photos with their phones. Took their phones out, took pictures of it. And I was like, "Wow, why are you doing that?" He said, "I don't wanna forget it. I don't wanna forget what we just did. And plus, I wanna share with my team."So I was finding those moments where be it a high school moment where it connects and someone engages with it, years later engaged with it when they saw it on a conference room table or in a room. So it just continued to progress. And people kept waving me on, just do it over here and do it over there.MR: Kind of encouragement.GK: And then there was a moment where it went from, you know, doodling and sketching for my parents, you know, to some positive and negative effects. And then doing it in high school and having a moment with some teachers where it's just like, "That was a reinforcement." And then being in the working environment and ad agencies and with companies, them calling it out is kind of different and helping me to remember the material. And I thought that's really kind of cool.And then there was a moment in the working world where I worked for maybe 10 years or 12 or more in new product development. As a group that I was one of the four charter members of a company in Cincinnati that started to do new products. So we would go into rooms and work with teams and research and sales and various others and start to build concepts for either beverages or foods or with hotel chains on how to build these new service programs.But it was basically going from nothing to prototypes and just loosely done sketches. And that was really a great call of a decade of that kind of work where you're working in the intangibles and being able to sketch quickly. And, you know, that was always a great expression that someone shared with me is that a doodle is really the first prototype for anything. And that really lived in the new product era.Another moment where I thought, okay, it's on now, it's kind of interesting, is I was doing an innovation session in Chicago for an education company that in essence trained accountants to become CPAs. So it was training-based and education-based. So a friend was running the program and said, "Hey, can you come out and join us for a couple of days and help facilitate and work their group for new ideas and new approaches, strategic planning kind of thing." And I said, "Sure, I'll do that."I showed up on a Friday—or no, I left on Friday. So I showed up on a Wednesday the night before, and we often grab a bite to eat and talk about, okay, what's the next two days gonna be about? I really hadn't known much about it. And she was always, "Ah, just go with it. You're pretty good on the fly. It's the usual thing except for an education brand." It's like, okay.But meeting with her and the rest of the team, somewhere between me leaving and showing up in Chicago, somebody had said. You know, I spoke to the client and they're really excited to do this, but someone sent me something in a PDF and it's called some kind of sketching."And we were all like, "Well, what do you mean exactly? You know what you mean prototype, just like writing sketchbooks and sharing it?" She said, "No in front of the room to hear the ideas and then to live sketch them in the room and move on to the next." It was a strange request because somebody said, "Hey, any of you guys do that?"MR: Here you are. "I can do that."GK: "Anybody with any experience?" And it was a very good friend of mine said, "I didn't even see this coming so don't feel obligated, but do you wanna try?" I said, "Well, I haven't done it in this capacity. And it was always fairly loose and spontaneous, but now this is part of an expectation of a two-day conference."MR: Right. It's different.GK: So, I remember asking, "What is the client's expectation?" So they said, "I'll send you PDFs of what it is. "And it was largely what you would imagine it would be, you know? A lot of just loose sketches and a lot of mind mapping. It was more energetic and more, excuse me, visually interesting mind maps than just circles and hubs and spokes kind of thing. So at that point, it's like, "What do I have to lose? Yeah, okay. I'll do it." So they went out and got foam core or other types of materials, and handed me the markers. And I showed up in the morning going, "This is either gonna go pretty good or okay, or—"MR: I'm never gonna do this again.GK: "— I'm never gonna do this again." It might've been when you really started to make this more mainstream and make people aware of its sketchnoting, all of a sudden people are like, "Hey, I saw this thing, can we do that?" And it was a moment in time where probably a lot of what you were doing and some of your, you know, colleagues, someone on this client team said, "I'd like to incorporate this into our session." And now, it was maybe one of the more lucky instances that I could imagine because it went really well.It's just while I was doing it, you have that out-of-body where you look down and go, "Man, this is like so much energy. Look at these people. There's laughter." And I found that that point, the style started to emerge a little bit, which was, it had a lot of that cartoonist in it. Some of my objects, and some of my people looked a little Don Martin-like from "Mad Magazine," and people were like, "Oh, that's funny." But there were many drawings over the course of two days that might've been 8 or 10, which was kind of fast stuff. And I realized, man, I'm kind of gassed at drawing, you know?But I went home and they did ask to ask me to do some buttoned-up, cleaned-up versions. And I still have that set of 10 or 12 that were fun to do, live in the room. And it really helped the team look at all the ideas and go, "I see all the components and you really characterized it, get rid of this one, we'll keep that one. And my friend who organized the session said they, they loved it And it was, you know, better than they thought. And it was a lot of people who had their hand in it. But me playing this little—it was like an improv, I played in bands in high school where you'd show up with your guitar with a bunch of strangers. And they're like, "Hey—"MR: Ladies and gentlemen.GK: "—you don't walk this way by Aerosmith." And it's like, enough, and boom, you're off, you go. So it was sort of a, a jam session using sketchnoting and it was one of those moments where I thought, "Okay, I got a new arrow in the quiver, and it's a pretty sharp one and a pretty cool one at a time when there was growing need for it.So the agencies that I worked with, they had also had like, "Hey, we got this, you know, different way of doing things." So I started to do every meeting like kickoffs and immersions and presentations, and even strategy meetings where I became a little bit of the clunky monkey with the symbols where I would come out and they're like, "Do that thing. "And then years went by and I realized this is an extension of all the things I did early on, and now a market had been created for it. Again, I'll take this opportunity to thank you for a lot of what you put out that did a lot of the heavy lifting.MR: Oh, thanks. Well, I think there were a lot of other people doing it too. And graphic recording, which is more of that large scale, in the front of the room stuff, existed since the '70s with David Sibbet, some others.GK: The Grove.MR: The Grove. Yeah. And some others MG Taylor, I think Matt, and Gail Taylor were doing it. They were also part of that early way before.GK: Yeah.MR: You know, in my experience, I didn't know that graphic recording was a thing. I stumbled into and invented the name sketchnoting and practiced it just 'cause it made sense to me. I didn't know if anybody else could apply it. It was just totally me making sense out of note-taking because it wasn't working. And then come to find out, hey, all the concepts that seemed really logical to me is the same stuff that these people standing in front of rooms getting paid to do the work are doing.And so, then I got involved with many of the people in that community. So now I'm connected to that community. So there's been a lot of people, I think, over time, that have been slowly building that wall. And there's lots of people now that enter the business or the space, or the community, wherever you wanna call it. And there's a huge wall built that you can walk on. A bridge, somebody built this bridge, but it took, you know, 10, 15 years of work to put that up.GK: Yeah, exactly. Right. And the other observation, which was a moment was, I think during COVID we're, I mean, globally, all kind of stuck in place, in homes and communities started to pop up and people, and it was critical that people chose to do that, is that people started sharing. And I started to see these similar things to what I was doing, but way different. And something that I could be inspired by coming from people in Italy, in Finland, and in the UK.And all of a sudden, without noticing, a year and a half later, I am connected to and sharing and just chatting to people throughout Europe and various other places that there's a bit of a kinship there that otherwise, you know, again, for me, when you work at different agencies and things, you get a little focused just on what you're doing and who you're doing it with. And now there's such a community out there where there's always something new to learn.And I think we all learn that a while ago, is continuing to learn, keeps you plugged in, keep you relevant and there's always a new perspective to learn something by, and I could look at some people's work and going, "Wow, that is so much in the way that works for them. I could never do it that way, but I really like how maybe the mechanics of it is something that can apply to my own thing."And then the great thing is that most of the people that I've been in touch with, they're like, happy, go, "Yeah, I'm glad something clicked for you and go and use it." And now I'm adapting different tools and templates for branding assignments. And now, I mean, I'm sure is some of the work of Dave Gray and Sunni with Gamestorming.MR: Yeah.GK: There were times where, and prior to seeing Gamestorming, I just realized I'm just having fun and upfront and drawing these funny little templates and asking people to put post-Its on this cartoon head of an empathy map before I knew what an empathy map was.MR: Right. Right.GK: And I realized that's a whole nother layer of this cartoonist turned brand guy that somehow made meetings more enjoyable and clients would be like that, "That wasn't even work. That was fun." And I thought, "Okay, that's I something I'd like to hear."MR: It's pretty cool.GK: Yeah. And it was just, again, a adapting some of those muscles that got built up and some of the other muscles that were deliberately built up in terms of advertising and branding. But it's been an interesting journey, and one that it was not prescribed, you know, I backed into a lot of different environments. The new product thing was just really something that through circumstances that ad agency wanted to get into new products. And I wound up being one of the people that wound up working in that part of the agency, and thought that was no dumb luck. That was really a cool break.MR: Yeah. Well, I think, on the flip side, you prepared yourself by doing all this work as a kid and continuing, of course, you had encouragement like by your teacher in high school, but you were doing it because it made sense to you, and you were putting in the hours doing it in meetings for yourself, then called before the group to do it, and they really gave you feedback.So all this prep put you in the position. Like, so had you not been doing that and you had the opportunity to be a part of that product group, you probably may not have gotten the job at least not to do that. Or maybe not at all. I don't know, right. Because you had this skill that was unique that you could bring to the table, and obviously it was the people that decided maybe you should be part of that had seen it in practice in the past. So everything's sort of built on top of the next thing.GK: I think that's true. I was lucky in some of those respects where it was as much of a surprise or an epiphany to the people around me as it was to me. And just in a very, I think basic sense you're adding value that maybe isn't everywhere. I think a lot of the people I've met and yourself included, it's an interesting package of talents, you know? I think it's just not something you see in classified ads.You become an amalgam of your experience and your talents and it makes you, you. And I think if you could find a group that appreciates that and really feeds it which I had the opportunity to work at a branding agency over a decade where they kept feeding me more opportunity to do that it's about growth. I think I'm happiest when I'm growing.MR: Yeah. I agree. I think so too. Well, this has been great. It's been really fun to see your progression to where you're at now and how you're using all this—all the things that you've built, they don't go away. They just become useful at different points in the project, right. So, That's pretty cool.I'm really curious now if we switch over from the work, your background, and how you got here. What are the tools that you like to use? We always do this with every guest. I discover new stuff all the time. And I thought I'd seen everything. So I love this part of it because there's like, "Oh, I'd never heard of that pen, or that notebook or that something.GK: Yeah. I wish I could bring more discovery to it, but in terms of the transition from analog to digital, I'm a bit of a work in progress. Because I still love—and maybe it has a lot to do with the nature of the work was always show up. And it has changed since COVID where there's mural and it's different. But over those years of development working with markers and paper, I think it was just, you know, I love the feel of a line.I have a lot of cartoonist friends 'cause I've been doing this cartoon strip for many years now, and I have a lot of cartoon friends, and they're still like, "Man, you still dip a quill pen in ink." And then there's one or two were that I still know that are There's nothing like a feel of that line. But, you know, a lot of the tablets now and the digital tools, so I'm doing my best and I found some coaches to move me there.But I'm one of those types, particularly with being very mobile and working in a place where it's just coffee shops and other places, I like being able to walk in and buy tools from Rite Aid. Whether it's a nice gel pen or a—I have a friend, Rob Armstrong, who does jumpstart very successful long running strip. He still hand draws all his strips with a Paper M1ate pen.MR: Really.GK: Yeah. And some people are like, "That would take forever." I think it's a call you make, but I do love the times I've dabbled and toyed with, you know, iPads and things, but I need to do some work on the digital side. You may have found this too, but there were stores in the past, there was an art store called Pearl on the East Coast, these superstore, you know, where I can get lost.MR: Lost in there for a day. Right.GK: I'm buying pens and paper, and there's one in Philadelphia, which I'm not far from, called BLICK.MR: Yeah, BLICK.GK: And BLICK is one of the remaining super stores. I like Copic. I'm a fan of that. There's a couple others I think Japanese made that has a really fine brush to it where you can—I love varying lines and creating some depth. But my tools are what they have been for years. I would even turn it around and say, your tools, what do you recommend digitally? I mean, is it Wacom? I mean, where are you at in the whole transition to digital?MR: Yeah. Well, I would say just understanding that you're someone who's mobile, and I'm a mobile person too. I think the iPad and the pencil is pretty great. The resolution with the pencil and the screen is good. I recommend some kind of a screen cover. I like Paperlike, which has got little patterns that are printed or embedded in the plastic. Not only does it make it matte so it's not shiny, but it also provides a paper-like texture, hence the name.GK: Yeah. That's really key to know. I'd have to even go back and get that again once this gets out because the times that I have toyed with things, it's a little tricky, it feels like you're, you're drawing on a glass surface. I have other daily strip friends who do comics and go, "I couldn't go back to that because my process is so quick, and now I can knock work out a lot faster." Their production approach is vastly different. Which I can understand where I have some shopping to do and figure out what I'm most comfortable with, but I'm in the middle of it. I have an iPad now that I toy with, but I don't actually do work on yet.MR: In production. Okay.GK: Yeah. Latex Syndicate does my coloring and that kind of thing.MR: Okay. There's a few apps that you might consider. Procreate is popular with lots of people. It's really aimed at art. It's got layering like Photoshop. You can choose different brushes and colors and you can record it and have it animated. There's all kinds of power in there. If you need to edit your lines, if you want vectors like Adobe Illustrator, there's a couple of tools. One is called Concepts who sponsors the podcast.GK: Yeah. I think I've seen that.MR: Where you have different brushes and such. But then you can grab the points just like in Illustrator and move things around. You can select whole chunks and change to a different brush and it flips. Adobe Fresco is another tool that does both pixels and vectors in the same application. So that's another one to play with. And that's a variety of other ones.Some people who are really doing more note-taking than art, lean toward other tools. There's lots of really great note-taking tools, Goodnotes and Noteshelf and even Apple's Notes is pretty decent. It supports the pencil. There are some that are more note-oriented. If you need the organization and the structure of notes and to be able to search and all that, then that might be the better path.And then there's stuff that fits in between like I use a tool called Paper by WeTransfer. It's super old. It's designed when the iPad first came out. What I like about it is it's very limited. So I can't change the screen size. There's no layers. There's limited tools and the tools set are limited sizes. The colors are adaptable. But I kind of like the constraints.And what I've found is I've invested so much time using it that if I need to knock out an idea quickly, I just go to that tool 'cause I know it so well. I know where all the parts are. I know what it's gonna achieve. I know how to achieve them. For me, it works really well. But I also use Procreate for illustration work. 'cause It's got benefits of resolution and layers and undo and other features.So I think you almost need to take a little little tour on each one and see which one fits. And there might be need, I believe, in multiple tools, because some projects require different expectations. So if you need to make something that needs to be zoomed up to a billboard, well, you probably wanna use a Vector tool because procreates gonna pixel out at some point, even if—unless you build the canvas to be big enough, which is one approach. The other approach is to go, you know, resolution-independent with Concepts or Fresco, and then you could scale. So that'd be my list for you.GK: All good stuff. No, that's a great one. I'm gonna have to pull that off because a near-term goal I set for myself is to really get set and getting that comfort level because a lot of my cartoonist friends use the same type of a setup. And I dabbled with there. So I'm gonna have to you know, step into this century.MR: I think it's important for you to find what works for you. So even if they use something else, who cares? Like, if it works for you, you know this already.GK: Yeah. I love the point you made that if you have real stuff to that you're accountable for, you have something that's familiar and reliable and you know what you're getting into, and then create experiment time to try some other things. But that would be my ideal setup is to have my go-to.MR: Yeah. I think the other thing that works for me, and this isn't true for everybody, but it might, is I need a real project to work on. When I wanted to use Procreate, I had a big illustration project and I said, "All right, I gotta use this. I gotta figure it out." I forced myself to sit down and build the templates and choose the different inks and sizes, and I set it all up, and then I forced myself to do a project with it. And that was a good solution. For me, I learn 'em as much as I can, and then there's a point which I have to flip over and use it, and then they start to make sense together, so.GK: Yeah. No, that's, that's good advice.MR: Yeah. Going back to your analog tools, I'm kind of curious if you have any specific ones that if you go to the Rite Aid, are there certain pens or notebooks or anything that you tend to work with? Do you have any notebooks that you like? Is there a certain gel pen brand that you prefer if you can get it?GK: I think in terms of paper it, as long as I can remember, it's always been the—oh man, what's the—it escapes me at the moment. I don't wanna say Valore, but, so that's not—MR: Like Parchment paper, something like that?GK: No, it's, it's a little heavier weight paper, but it's in Michael's is another place that I go. it's just—vellum. Thank you.MR: Vellum. Yeah.GK: Whatever part of my brain say Valore. It's not Valore, it's Vellum, but it's Bristol Vellum. The Vellum has that nice tooth to the line. And I still love to see the interplay between a line and a piece of paper and scan it. Whenever I see my strips, the weekly strip I look at, and it's just like, I remember that line. It's a little obsessive. But I do the Copic pens of a lot of variety, but it's a good firm. Its tip doesn't mash.MR: Lays on top of that Bristol Vellum as well.GK: Yeah. And you could lean in and that's good. And then there's—is it Tubo? I forget. It's a Japanese pen. They sell 'em in too, and then I go through them like whenever I see them, I buy 'em. But they're mostly one's a firm paint or a brush tip. The other one's a little more of a traditional paint or a brush I should say. But that's usually in the Michaels or the BLICK. This is from Rob, you know, he does a lot of his lettering with a Paper Mate pen.MR: Paper Mate Flair.GK: Yeah. The Flair, it's like the Chuck Tailors of sneakers of mark making. I mean, it's just like tie up the Chucks and put 'em on, you know, and whenever I'm in Rite Aid or CVS, it's just like, "Okay, buy a couple things. We need, you know, milk, bread, Paper Mates."MR: Paper Mates.GK: And I always have those. I'm thankful that they don't discontinue that. I have huge, you know, just boxes of pens and I'm not loyal to, you know, other than what the ones that I've mentioned, because they've served me well. I do need to experiment and push out. But those are the Copic and the Paper Mate.MR: Simple tool set. Yeah.GK: Yeah. That's what I use for the strip. And my strip, I do on the vellum. I just scan them, clean them up, and send it to the syndicate. I work with King Features, and King Features does all the colorizing, and they distribute it to the papers and they send me the finish and it's always like Christmas. I send them these little black and white comics, and then they send me the archives of all the colorized.The strip I do a strip called Out On The Limb, and it's been like 30 years with King. And it's always that same relationship as I send them the finished black and white, and they colorize it. All my other friends are like, I still use my digital 'cause I wanna color it the way I want to. I should get used to that, but I love that King does that for me, and it's a nice joint relationship for many years now.MR: Yeah. It's worked for a long time. Maybe it doesn't need to be changed at all.GK: Yeah. It will eventually. At least being able to control that and send. I'm sure they wouldn't be mad if their production team in Orlando goes, "Oh, he's gonna do color. We don't have to do that anymore."MR: Yeah. Thankfully.GK: "It took forever." So, we'll see.MR: Interesting. So that makes me curious, since you're a cartoonist and you continue to be for a long period of time, what I think could be interesting to answer would be how do you deal with, every week you've gotta come up with an idea. Where do you get your ideas from? How do you cook up those? Are they just stuff that you encounter and you put 'em away somewhere? Do you have a tool or a notebook where you write things down? Like how do you manage that stuff?GK: It's really interesting, A lot of the same muscles. It's like listening and observing. Somewhere, somebody said this and it always stuck, which is, "You gotta do A, B, C. Always be capturing." So wherever I am, and now with iPhones, if I see an absurd notion in the world, I put it in the phone. And then I have a bit of a writing routine where Sunday nights I often go, "Okay, let me see this culmination of photos and post-its and backs of envelopes."The world is great stimulus for ideas. And sometimes I'll just stockpile them and then sit down and process it. And there was an incident where, I'm sure you've noticed is that I was walking through Barnes and Noble and went through like the top 10 books, often business books. So the top 10 business books, six out of the 10 business books had the F-bomb in it.Suddenly, major business books all have you know, F-words, we'll keep it at that. And I just thought, "What is that?" And then my mind started to play with that whole reality. And a cartoon happened where there was a woman—I took it out of the bookstore and put it into the standard library and saw a little librarian with a bit of a potty mouth talking to somebody who was directing them to the business book of the section, which is essentially, the cartoon was like, "Hey, it's okay. Let's everyone—just F-away, man. It's accepted."Because I just thought, wow, when did this this—people are now writing books to see if they could top someone else. So that was just an example of ideas happen because I just always keep one hand free. And I heard recently, there's a great quote by Neil Simon, and he said, he said it for comedy writers, but I think it's true of cartoonists, but also anyone who's creative.And Neil Simon said, "Comedy writers are two-headed monsters. One head is like everybody else. They go to the DMV, they go to Rite Aid, they put gas in the car. That's the one head. The other head is the one that kind of rises up and looks around and notices all the things around that other head and the rest of the body." And that's why that one really spoke to me because my wife will be one saying, you know, we're at this parent-teacher night, and my mind is like, wow. And she's like, "Earth to Gary, can you kind of dial back in here into this parent-teacher night?"So part of that is I do have that second head kind of out there looking for odd connections to make. And, you know, I'm hoping it never stops, but I'm always looking and always capturing stuff I can maybe use later. And many times it's writing it down in a small notebook and other times with the laptop. And now with the phone, that's the one piece of digital that I've become really relying on is photos and notes to myself, because it is true, you forget those epiphanies, you know?And there are times where I'll read a note, much like an old "Seinfeld" episode with a note he put on his next to his bed, where he couldn't decipher what it was he wrote at 2:00 in the morning. There are times where I can't make sense out of a note, but I still feel good having taken the note. Because there are times that some of the best ideas come from other people and just being in the right place. And that's why many of my coworkers coming out of those meetings that I described earlier, once they see me write something, they're like, "You didn't write that." When I said, "Right. I'm not gonna be an inspiration for a cartoon."And many times, they had, and I share it with them, but there'd be just brilliance that are far beyond what I'm thinking at that time. And I would just write something down and later the sweetest little gag and I'd often share it with them. And going back to my science teacher, they're happy to get it. And every single day, and particularly the world we live in now, there's just so much, to your point, you know constantly making new connections. And that's why I think, you know, there's always stuff to have fun with and build ideas around. So it's paying attention.MR: Well, let's shift into tips. I always frame it that someone's listening their individual thinking, but they feel a little bit like they're in a rut or hit a plateau. They just need some inspiration. What would be three things that you would tell them practical or, you know, mental suggestions to help them break out of that rut or just move forward?GK: This isn't too long ago myself, where I start to feel like it's a bit of a rut and also a rut, but also sometimes when you transition because I moved from agency life into now my own consultancy, which it's a different world and it's a different metabolism almost. I mean, it's just different. And I think that led me to this idea of the tip is sometimes just continue to—I'll use my case of, of writing and drawing and things, is to create and share.I mean, there are so many people that—I'm sure yourself and I know people like Austin Cleon has a book or two out there. It's just like, just put it out and let that be a source of conversation. And during that time when I started to expand some of the community with sketchnoters, I would just do things, you know, whether it was listening to a particular podcast, and I just would draw it and say, here's something I did. And it turned out to be something on LinkedIn where I started to share more, and I heard back more, and I got feedback.So whenever you're stuck put something out. And that's the beauty right now of even LinkedIn. If there are people that you admire or people that whose opinion, you'd appreciate, you know, share something and say, "There's something I'm working, I'd love to get your thoughts." And, you know, no harm could come from doing, creating something and putting it out, and sharing it. I mean, you might get, you know, feedback that people sometimes aren't always kind.But I think by and large the tip would be to just, you know, create every day and put it out there and start conversations with it. And there were times where I do, and I call it the Kopious notes now 'cause my name is Kopervas. So I will listen to a podcast or something of—an example of if I was stuck again, I'm not generating anything anymore, I will listen to a podcast or something.A friend of mine who wrote for Forbes interviewed Brian Grazer. And it had to do with this, he was launching a book called "The Curious Mind." And my friend Steve said, here, could you just listen to this interview that I recorded and can you give me some your takeaway on it? I listened to it and sketchnoted the whole thing, and sent it to him. And he sent it to Brian Grazer, who is in the process of a couple other things with this writer friend of mine.But in doing that sketchnoting, I learned a ton about this idea of I'll cut to the chase on that one is that Brian Grazer has curious conversations from his book. Every two weeks he talks to someone who has nothing to do with Hollywood or directing or producing to learn something. Maybe a long way around to the other idea of do things and share is if there's something you wanna learn, draw it.Because there's that eye-hand thing is that your mind learns when you, you draw it. And it turns out that many of that type of thing, I sent work to authors or even podcasts that guests and they loved it. And we had relationship of, whether it's LinkedIn or whatever of "send me more."I think if I'm stuck, I try to engage new people with work I've done and see where it goes. 'Cause In some cases it's led to consulting gigs. There was two authors that wrote a book, and I was taken by it and I did a quick sketchnote for each of the chapters—or actually for just one of the chapters. And they hired me to do that for all of their chapters.MR: Wow. That's cool. Yeah.GK: Ruts are just kind of like a pause and it's like, "Okay, now what?" When I get to that point when I'm stuck, it usually means I'm at a pause of some sort so I need an interaction with somebody.MR: You need a reason to move forward, I guess. Right.GK: And someone will inspire it or someone will validate something I've been thinking about. And I think I've learned to rely on others to get me through these little pauses and ruts.MR: If I were to re restate those, I guess the first one I heard was if you're in a rut, do something and share it.GK: Yes.MR: The second is, if you wanna learn something, draw it because you have to process the information to understand it. And then the third would be share your work with the people who inspired you. So like a podcast guest, an author, and you never know where that interaction might lead. If anything, you'll just have their appreciation. And all those three things in a row is you've done something to move forward, you've learned something new and you've made an interaction. That's a really great combination of things.GK: And I love the distillation on that, Mike. Thank you. And I think the other, I don't know, maybe it's a wrapping for all of it that I have found whenever I get stuck in a crossroads, whatever, how you wanna describe it, to do some of those things, but it really helps to just get on someone else's radar. And I found whether it was from other brand consultants or those sketchnoters in other parts of the world, get on other people's radar, they get on your radar, and all of a sudden, I find myself not stuck as much because because of that happening to me.So I think there's something about that. And I think we live in a time now where it's much easier to get on other people's radars because we have such access now, whether it's Instagram or LinkedIn is very big from a business standpoint. So use it.MR: Yeah. Those are great tips. Thanks. So to wrap the show up, I just ask where people can find you and your work so they can connect with you, so they can see what you do, they can check out your comic strip, see your work that you do.GK: Yeah, no, that's great. I think I'm most active on LinkedIn. That's where I do a lot of posting and it does have a bit of a business centered approach to it. But I put a lot of things there 'cause So many of my things tie to business. So LinkedIn is one. Facebook is a little more some fun stuff there as well. And at Kopious Notes on Instagram. I've been not pushing that as much. And maybe when this does get out and is live, I will have gotten back on that. But Kopious Notes is where I'm at in Instagram.And same idea is work in progress on garykopervas.com is a site that I've neglected, but there's a lot of my early cartoons there. And that's a either last quarter or first quarter of this year where that's gonna get reinvigorated perhaps.MR: Revamped.GK: Yeah.MR: Nice. Well, that's great. We'll either find those links and put 'em in the show notes, or as we follow up after this interview, maybe you can send me things you wanna make sure we include. So for those that are listening, check out the show notes. We try to make our show notes pretty extensive, and we include transcription of the discussion so if you're a reader, you can read while you listen. So we've got lots of options for you. And we're really happy to have you on, Gary. This has been a long time coming and I'm so glad that you came on the show and you just fit right into our community, just so well.GK: Yeah. Thanks so much. It was a real pleasure. And as you say, I was really waiting for this for some time, and it was awesome. So thanks for having me and have a great weekend.MR: Yeah. Well, thanks for all that you do, and for anybody listening or watching, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until next time, talk to you soon.

In this episode, Ashton Rodenhiser shares her mission to teach sketchnoting skills to students and professionals so they can use doodling and drawing as their best thinking and learning tools.Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Ashton?Origin StoryAshton’s current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find AshtonOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Ashton’s WebsiteAshton’s WebsiteAshton on TwitterAshton on InstagramAshton on FacebookAshton on Youtube Ashton on Pinterest Ashton on TikTok Ashton on LinkedInBook: Beginner's Guide to SketchnotingFree video lessonIFVP ConferenceFind Your Artistic Voice by Lisa CongdonDario PaniaguaToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Sketcher markerNeuland Bullet tip outlinerPosca pensMicrosoft Surface ProSketchbook ProDocument cameraTipsHowever you need to create it, do it.Cliches are okay.Don't get into the comparing mode.When you are intimidated, you can instead flip it and turn it into inspiration.Have clean nice letters.CreditsProducer: Alec Pulianas Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Ashton. Ashton Rodenhiser, how are you today?Ashton Rodenhiser: I'm doing so well, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.MR: It's so great to have you on. We've had fits and starts trying to get this recorded and we finally did it, so I'm excited. And so looking forward to talking with you and sharing your story with everyone. So why don't we just jump right in? Tell us who you are and what you do.AR: Yeah. So I am based in Canada, on the East Coast of Canada. You know, being a mother is pretty important to me, so I always like to mention that. I have three small children between the ages of 5 and 10. I felt like growing up I really wanted to be an artist, but it was like never an option 'cause there was just so much negative rhetoric in my home, in my community about, you know, the lack of art opportunities out there. I put that in a diplomatic way.And so, I really struggled even though I did really well in school, I really did not know what I "wanted to be when I grew up." And I fell into a role as a facilitator. I did that for a couple of years, and that's how I learned about graphic facilitation and kind of where I am today. That was 10 years ago, this month, fall of 2013. It's really easy for me to remember because it was the longest I'd left my six-month-old at the time. It was a whole day to take a graphic facilitation course.I had never even seen it before, but I was like, "This is the best thing ever," where I was able to take my experience as a facilitator and my love for all things creative and mash them together. And then I was facilitating a group at the time and luckily, they were just so great and easygoing. I just threw some paper on the wall and started drawing and I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. It was horrible. But I still have that picture to this day and share it often actually as like, "This was my first one, look how bad it was."And you know, I put it away for a few months and then I brought it out after a while and I looked at it and I was like, "Whoa, I can remember so much from this." It took it from, oh, this is kind of fun and cool and neat to, whoa, this is an actually a powerful thing. This is a way to help navigate that learning and that experience. So doing it in the moment was fun and great, but it was more so about that like after effect for me when I brought it out later and reflected on it and was like, this is more than what I thought it was, in a way.Then it was at that point that I was like, I might like this. This seems like actually helpful. So maybe I will do this more 'cause it's a good time and it's actually helpful. So, fast forward a little bit. I did, you know, a little bit for those first few years and I actually attended the IFVP Conference in Austin, Texas in 2015. And I was a scholarship recipient for that. There's no way I would've been able to go if I hadn't received that. So, very grateful to that opportunity to this day.And I went with a mission in mind. I was like," I'm gonna go and just try to soak up as much as I can. And when I leave, I'm gonna make a decision." Like this is gonna be just like a side hobby that I'll do when people ask me to. Or I'm gonna take this like seriously as a business and I'm gonna try to do it. And obviously, you know, the answer to that question. But yeah, it was a few months after that, after I had my second child that I started building a business around graphic recording, graphic facilitation, live illustration. Yeah.MR: You know, it's interesting you said that it took you a while putting away the work to see your own value in it later. You looked at it like, "Wow, this is really helpful. I remember a lot of the detail because of the work I did." So I think what you were sort of seeing was, I think was a delayed reaction to what the people in the rooms saw.AR: Right. Yeah.MR: 'Cause You know, a lot of times we look back at the work we do and we think, "In light of what I do now, that's so terrible. It was so bad." But then, you know, to the people in the moment who experienced it, for them it was, you know, mind blowing because they'd never seen anything like that. And it was helpful regardless of what it looked like. It brings you back to like, it's a lot more of the action of the doing and a whole lot less on the beauty of it. Functionality of it is way more valuable now. Of course, it's good if you can make it look really beautiful. I mean, that's always nice.AR: That's a bonus, definitely.MR: But it reminds you that the bones of this stuff that we do is really about the functionality of the work we're doing. And then if we can layer on beauty and layout and all these things on top of it, that just adds another layer to it and it makes it even more enjoyable for both you and for the recipient. Anyway, that struck me when you brought that out.'Cause I've been thinking about that too. I've looked at some really old sketchnotes that I did way back in 2007, was like, "Compared to what I do now, these are very rudimentary and basic." But I needed to start somewhere. And even those, the bones of them were valuable regardless of if they were exactly what I would've wanted now. I mean, at the time I was okay with it, obviously. So, interesting.AR: Yeah, No, I love that. I love that for sure.MR: Well, I'm curious, you mentioned coming from Eastern Canada and you talked about the scholarship to go to Austin, which I can imagine that trip was not cheap and that scholarship probably helped. So tell us your origin story. How did you—you gave us hints to it, you went to this event and made that decision. Fill us some more detail about, how were you as a little girl that brought you to the point at Austin, right? Like, were you always drawing, like, all that stuff?Because I too faced a thing where my dad sat me down and said, "Mike, you can't make money in art. You should find another career path." And I went into printing. And through printing, I found that design was actually a path I could take, which was related. So I'd love to hear your little girl to Austin story, and then I'd love to hear more detail about building that business and how did you come to where you're now?AR: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I guess, I try to do a overview, but yeah, I can dive into it a bit more. I've always been very creative, very self-taught. I've never really taken an art class in my life. I call myself a dabbler. So name a medium, I've probably tried it. Either I tried it for a week or I tried it for a year. I sold painted rocks as a child at craft fairs.So I guess I didn't realize I was a bit entrepreneurial until I started a business and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I guess I have done entrepreneurial things throughout my life." And it was funny that I also was connected to something creative. So I've always been really fascinated in different mediums, but I didn't actually spend a whole lot of time drawing. I painted and did things like that, but I didn't actually draw pictures a lot.I had a few, how to draw cats, how to draw some things, but I didn't have a lot of patience for building the skill of drawing. The art forms that I would find were more instant gratification. I wanted to paint a picture in an hour. I didn't wanna paint a picture over a series of months. So I didn't realize until a few years ago that I think my impatience is actually one of the things that is kind of, I feel like with sketchnoting and live illustration and all that is actually a beautiful fit for me because you have the timeframe and you're like, "All right, it's a half an hour, it's done. Or it's an hour, it's done. Or it's a day, it's done."I've always been very creative, but just doing my own thing, self-taught, try different things. If anything, I learned many different instruments. Learning how to play the bagpipes right now, just for fun, you know. So I took lessons for things like that. But I think, like I said earlier, I didn't even really consider being an artist because it was just the aura.No one really sat me down, like, your experience and said, "You can't do that. That's not gonna work out for you." It was just the stories I would hear of people saying, "Oh, that kid, are you going to art school, good luck with that." And I'm like, "Well, I don't want that for me." You know. And at the time, the only thing that I had considered was being a teacher 'cause I'd always really loved kids.I graduated high school around the recession, 2008 recession. And so it was a hard time to decide what to do after high school because no matter what you did, no one had jobs. Around here anyways, at that time there was a lot of people graduating teacher college and not having work. So I felt like that was going to be a waste of time if I go and spend all this time doing this education and then it doesn't work out.So I pursued an early childhood education to work with these little kids. And that's when I got a job at a nonprofit. I moved to the city thinking that I might be a sign language interpreter. So I started taking all the prerequisites to do that. And that's what I went to the city for. Ended up there being there for a few years because I loved this job at this nonprofit where I started to learn about community development and facilitation. And that's how I got into that.But still, I painted and I did a few things, you know, throughout my life, but I definitely had, you know, dips and lulls, you know, when I was on a very strict budget trying to pay back my student loan. I had a craft budget of $20 a week that I would allow myself to go and buy art supplies. And it was like the highlight of my week, and I would just craft all the rest of the week. But yeah, it was just all over the place in terms of just the things that we would do for fun.That's how I met my husband in high school, I was knitting in the library. And then, I just felt like when I found this work, it was this beautiful coming together of the things that I loved about facilitation and the listening and the thinking 'cause I felt like I always wanted to have a job where I wanted to help people. But when you're younger, the notion of helping people are, you know, you have to be a doctor or something like that. Well, how am I supposed to help people if I don't wanna be a doctor or new nurse or something like that.And when I found facilitation and in this world with those two coming together, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I could like help people. I could help people learn and engage." And I really fell in love with group process with facilitation, creating a safe space and allowing them to feel heard. And it's not about me imposing my ideas or my knowledge, it's really about them.And I was like, this is the best 'cause You don't need to know anything. You know, I joke about that with teachers. But it's this beautiful space to be able to create for people. And then when I started experiencing doing it in the graphical way, I was like, this is really, really cool and I wanna do more of it. Yeah.MR: It sort of added that craft or that creative layer that had been missing, it seems like to me.AR: Yeah, definitely.MR: So you had all the facilitation skills and what this added was the creative part of you then could be turned on and be active too, right? And just not all business.AR: Yeah. And I think that's why—I don't know if I didn't have the experience as the facilitation person first, I don't know what the transition would've been like. I feel like because I had my listening and my thinking skills honed over a few years, the adding the visual element wasn't as scary, I think as it might be for others who are like, "Now I have to, you know, listen and think and draw. So I have to like, develop all these skills."Whereas like, I had the listening and the thinking skills, I had been developing that already, adding in the drawing, like, so then I was able to focus more those early years on the drawing part because I was the listening and thinking was a bit more intuitive. You know, 'cause the way I would describe to people is, as a facilitator, you're listening and thinking, and you're feeding back in words.And now I can listen and think and feedback in pictures, right? So, I don't think it was as big of a jump coming from that space because I'm like, "I can learn the drawing skills. I can learn over time." I didn't really put a whole lot of pressure on myself in the beginning. I just learned some basic drawings. I joke with people that I basically drew a light bulb on every single graphic I did for three years because I'm like, "I know how to draw a light bulb." You know what I mean?I think I just allowed myself to know that I would develop those skills over time if I just kept at it and that the listening and the thinking would really pull me through. Because even if it's mostly words and little drawings there, those few years, the content is always gonna be so important, especially when you're in a room with people and allowing them to feel valued and heard. If you throw a few graphics in there, you know, pretty basic when you're starting, it doesn't really matter, right?And sometimes when I'm teaching and talking with people about it, I'm like, you know, "That will come over time. Just be patient with yourself." And, you know, a lot of times people—this is still really new and they don't have anything to compare it to, which is amazing. So if you just throw some paper on a wall and do it, it's gonna be amazing no matter what. You know what I mean?MR: Right.AR: It just is opening that door and like, they don't know that other people exist in the world who have been doing it longer and maybe it looks like, "prettier." Like, it doesn't matter. And sometimes it's needs to be messy. 'Cause I tell people like, conversations are messy, so sometimes the graphic's gonna be messy. And that's just what it is, you know?MR: Yeah. Comes back to our earlier discussion about what's the most important it's the bones of the value of being in the room together, being heard, capturing something.AR: Exactly. Yeah.MR: It's a good enough graphic. You know, in my experience as designer, especially when I do concept work with people, 'cause that's really what I do, whether it's illustration, I used to do logo and icon design, the rougher the sketches the better because then they feel like they have a say in it, they have a part in it, they can see, you know, there's room to maneuver a little bit.So in some ways, the messier sketches are actually more attractive, weirdly enough, in a process environment, because the focus is on the process. And then eventually, as long as you're in a boat—you know, if you're in a sailboat, which I've been on, you know, you're not going in a straight line. You're catching the wind one way, and you're tacking back and forth, but you're going toward a final destination, right. You're not just going in a straight line like you can in a motorboat. Even in a motorboat, honestly, they're floating around a little bit too, right.So if you think about that as a metaphor, it's being by water, right? So it's like, but ultimately you're gonna get to Nova Scotia, right? You're gonna come in to that point, it's just like the way you get there is gonna maybe be messy for a while. So if you think of it that way, you know, you're moving towards a destination and you know, it's gonna have its ups and downs, but everybody knows that we're gonna end up in the right place. That that's a great feeling.AR: Yeah. I love that. That's a great analogy. I'm gonna use that.MR: You steal it if you want to.AR: Yes, I will. Thank you.MR: Well, that's really cool. So tell us a little bit about the kind of work you're doing now. What is your ideal clients and is there someone you can share, you know, that you don't have any kind of agreements with that you're, that you can talk about? And then also, you have a book you've released. I want you to talk about that book, most definitely. So let's go in that order. Tell us a little bit about the work you do and then let's talk about your book.AR: I usually spend my time doing graphic recording, graphic facilitation. The way that I like to define it is graphic recordings, more like the conference world. There's speakers. I do a lot of that. Like, that's probably the majority, right. And then there's the graphic facilitation world, which is what we talked a lot about so far, is finding myself in those situations where there's groups of people and you're helping them come to some decision or, you know, there's multiple voices.So usually let's say like one voice or multiple voices. A room full of people having a conversation or a speaker on a stage. So lots of graphic recording, some graphic facilitation, would love to do more of it, but some of that. And I started teaching in person workshops, I think back in 2018, 2000 and something like that. Like pretty early on. And did some in-person things, and just did another one last week. But I hadn't done one in three years because you know, the world.MR: Yeah. Yeah.AR: And so, it was so exciting to get back in person because there's nothing better than, you know, helping people stand at a wall for the first time and make those marks. So, some of that. And then, yeah, released my "Beginner's Guide to Sketchnoting" book here just a few months ago. Because I was finding that a lot of people were saying to me all the time, "I would love to learn this skill. I wish you could follow me around, we record every meeting that I go to."And I would say to people, you know, "It's like, not that hard. You could totally learn it." And they just brush you off. They're like, "No, no way. I could possibly." And I'm like, "But you could though, but you could." And so, I started this sort of journey process of putting this book together, which took about a year and a half and did beta reading and getting feedback from people. 'Cause with the idea of trying to make the concept of learning sketchnoting as accessible as possible. Really handholding people through that process.We can talk a little more about that if you want to, but that's generally it. And so yeah, I have a little sketchnoting community and the book and stuff. So I'm just in this space now of really trying to just talk about, you know, helping people move through learning this.And one area that I'm specifically focusing, and I'm trying to do some case studies this year, is like, with students in school and trying to get into some schools and do some case studies. And with a little bit of trouble, but I'm getting there. I'm getting there trying to build relationships and do the things there, because I think if we can—like my 10-year-old, I've been teaching her some things because I know that in her school, that's when they start teaching note taking.So I don't know what it is like for other places in the world, but grade 5, age 10 is where they start to introduce note taking. So I was like, "Okay, well if this is when they're starting to introduce it, then maybe that's the age demographic or group that I need to be talking about."Because I do have schools that have brought me in to teach like older grades, but I feel like if we could do it earlier as the foundation and then they can choose, they have multiple ways that they can do their note taking and do it right in the beginning instead of, you know, they started to have develop a way that they do it, and then a few years later you introduce this, then it might not come as naturally. So I'm trying to find that sweet spot right now and work with schools to see what that looks like trying to get that into part of their learning for note taking. Yeah.MR: Well, I would guess having a book that's published certainly helps with getting in. That's helped me for sure. Who would you say is the main ideal reader for the book? Do you have in mind a group of people that the book is aimed to? Or is it more of a broad, anybody can read this book kind of thing?AR: Yeah. It's definitely a broad, but more of someone who might have considered themselves creative at one point, maybe have a weird relationship with creativity, because I find I'm having more conversations about that these days where people are like, "Well, I'm not creative." I'm like, "But you are though. But you are. Maybe you don't draw and that's okay. But maybe you're really funny or maybe—"MR: Some other space. Yeah.AR: Yeah. Maybe you're a good storyteller, you know. So, I find it's more of the people that want to reengage with their creativity. And I feel like that's just, like I said, a lot of the conversation I'm having with people a lot lately, but they have this weird relationship maybe with drawing. Maybe they doodled a little bit, maybe they didn't, but they know that the way that they kind of learn traditional note taking just doesn't work for them. And they're trying to see what they can do to get back to adding a little bit more creativity into their learning space, right. And having to do that.MR: How can they make it enjoyable?AR: Exactly. So I find that that's the—you know, that plus trying to encourage students and kids to do as well. But in terms of my more adult audience, it seems to be—you know, so some of it's like, you know, English as a second language teachers that are trying to be able to explain concepts. And I work a lot in technology, so I end up having a lot of people in cybersecurity and things like that in my community, and they're trying to figure out how to be able to explain more technical concepts and things like that.MR: That's pretty cool.AR it is quite broad, but it's like, you know, the leap that people think is really scary and trying to make that not as scary 'cause just getting people to share their first one. Just do one, just do one sketchnote and share it, that seems to be the biggest leap for people. 'Cause once you do that first one, you're like, "Oh, that wasn't so scary." You know what I mean?MR: Yeah.AR: So it's more about like that type of person who's like, "Oh, I'd like to try this." And in my book, I don't talk about any theory, I just drop a little brain guy throughout it. Like, "Oh yeah, did you know this thing, and there's this research?" 'Cause I want it just to get right to it and get people to put pen to paper quickly as possible. Because that's one thing that really frustrates me about nonfiction books is that most of them, unfortunately, are idea books.And I didn't want it to be a book like, "Sketchnoting is good, see you later." You know, be like, "Draw this thing, do this exercise." You know. And it's big and short enough that it is hopefully not overwhelming for people, you know? Like, it was twice as long and I just cut it and cut it and cut it. And then anything that I felt was a little bit advanced, I was just cut. I just like, nope. Or when I was doing my beta reading and people were getting confused, I was like, "Okay. Too advanced, cut it, cut it."MR: Well, you know, save those things for your second book, I guess for the advanced students who move in part two, right. You can put those in a second edition. Or not a second edition, but another book for those who wanna proceed to level two.AR: Yeah. Yeah. So I really wrote it in the sense of trying to handhold people through the process and to cut down that learning curve as much as I possibly can, because I feel like I was just encountering so many people that were like, "Oh, I could never do that." And I'm like, "But you could. You definitely could." And trying to show people in a really low barrier to entry, non-threatening way that that it's possible, right?So, the first thing that I walk in through in the book is like, "Just draw a line. You did it." The book's very cheer leadery. I'm like, "You got this." You know. 'Cause I think what happens is people look at beautiful sketchnotes by yourself or me, and they're like, "Oh, I can never do that." You know, I'm like, "But you can't compare your beginning to my 10 plus years in, right?MR: Right. I tell people that too.AR: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I love it when people can see the—like, "This was my first one. This was my first one." And they can compare from that space rather than, "Oh, well, if they look at Ashton's, oh my God, I could never create that." And I'm like, you know, I try to tell people, I'm like, "But I've been doing this for so long. And I do so many." I think I recorded over 600 presentations just last year. So like, that's a lot.MR: It's a lot of practice.AR: That's a lot.MR: Lots, yeah.AR: That's a lot, you know. If you did 600 in a year, you'd be pretty good too. Like, maybe even better than mine. You know what I mean?MR: Right. There might be something in you that we don't even know about because you haven't explored it. Right. But it's never fair to compare your first shot to my finished product after years and years of practice. It's not a fair comparison and it shouldn't be.AR: Yeah. I wish I would've read this before I published my book, or I would've put it in it, but there's a book called "Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon. And in it, she talks about the beginner's gap. And when I read it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is like exactly what I've been thinking about this whole time." But she put it in these concise, beautiful words, but there's where you wanna be, right? "I want my stuff to look like Ashton's or Mike's or whoever," right?But then there's your skillset, and your skillset doesn't match where you wanna be. So there's this huge gap in between. So what happens is that, because they're like, "I want my skills to match this." But they don't, they don't close the gap. They don't do the practice and the work to get to the point where their skills are developed that it could look, you know, in their own style or in their own whatever, right.That's where see and I get saddened by when people are at that stage in the very beginning, but they see where they wanna go, and they just stop before they even start trying. You know. They're like, "I can't, I'm never gonna be like that. I want my—" Or they'll try it and they'll be so unhappy with it because it doesn't match their expectation of reality in their mind, right. Like, "Oh, I want it to look like this and it didn't, so I give up." Right.So, my part with trying to put this book together is like, how can I help close that gap just even a little bit and allow people to get a little bit of success so that they feel like then they can continue to develop their skills? 'Cause people ask me all the time, like, "How did you get to the point you are? And I'm like, "Just practice." Like, it's not a sexy answer, unfortunately.MR: Yeah. Just kept going. Yeah.AR: But I just did it and did it, and they were bad and they were messy and they were not beautiful. You know what I mean? But even though when I go back and I look at my earlier stuff and how messy, and they looked like they still served a purpose for the people or for myself. So it didn't really matter. Like we were talking about like, you know, sometimes the messier the better too, right?MR: Mm-hmm.AR: But I do teach aesthetics because people care about that. Because if I just said, "It doesn't matter what it looks." No one would do it. They'd be like, well, if it s mess—like I want it to look nice. So I definitely do teach that. But with trying to infuse "it doesn't matter" at the same time. It's okay if it's messy. Yeah.MR: Sort of like, it's good enough for where you are now, and let's keep going. So it's like you have that far away goal of it needs to look like that thing, but I know that's gonna be difficult, but what I did today is good enough for a first step and for today and tomorrow I'll get a little tiny bit better, and the next day I'll get a little tiny bit better and then I'll backtrack and then I'll get back and get back to normal and, you know. Sort of like, no, if you let people know that it's gonna be a journey.It's like setting expectations so there's not an expectation like, "Well, I'll do this for an hour and I'll be as good as someone who, you know, done 600 pieces in a year." That's not a fair comparison. So again, it's almost like resetting perspective around what's a reasonable expectation for you.AR: Absolutely.MR: That's what we're doing in a lot of ways, which is, I think it's good. That's good. Because there's a lot of places where that mindset is helpful, not just in the work we do. So, it's really cool.AR: Yeah. I'm nervous to say this to you, Mike, but I will say I almost feel like my book might be a precursor to your book. There's a few things in there that are similar, but I don't know if you feel the same way, but feel it's a bit of the—MR: Well, I'm a big believer in lots of books existing because I think there's a lot of voices that exist and not everybody is in the right place to hear just one book. And a lot of times a different person at a different time and a different way is the right solution for that person. So I'm a big believer in, hey there's a lot of people that don't do anything yet. We need a lot of books that reach in every direction.So that very may well be that someone would maybe process through your book and then "I wanna go to the next level, or I wanna just see a different voice. Oh, I like how Mike does it. For me, that fits for me. I'm gonna follow that path." Or, "I'm gonna choose this other book because that makes sense to me." And I think that's good to have options 'cause Not everybody is the same. And to expect them to be all the same and just use one resource is not realistic, right?AR: And I want the listeners to know how great you are. So I'm gonna just talk about you for a second. I was very nervous to put this book out, and I felt like I needed your thumbs up of approval because you're the dude that coined the term sketchnoting. And when I was writing this book, I was really worried because I'm like, "I didn't create this word. You know, I try to make that very clear every time I talk to anybody, I'm always like, "Mike Rohde, Mike Rohde, Mike Rohde," always talking about you all the time.Because it can be very scary to put out work like this and you don't know how it's gonna be received. And when I got on that call with you earlier this year, you were like, "The more the merrier." And I'm like, oh, that makes me feel so good because it does feel like we—you know, the visual thinking community is like, we're worldwide, but tight-knit, you know? And I've experienced that and it's the best community ever.And I think because we are so caring for each other is like, we wanna make sure we're doing things in like the most respectful way possible. And you know, I felt so—I was just like, I'm on cloud nine after I got off that call with you because you were like, "The more the merrier. I love it." You know, and exactly kind of the things you just said too. And I think that's like, having that sort of abundance mindset is just like such a beautiful thing and such a asset to this community.So I really appreciated your kindness because it definitely feels like you know, from the outside, it's like—it's a funny thing when you're putting something like this together. I'm like, "No, it's not the Sketchnote Handbook, but it's like, you know, I'm just trying to do my thing and just share what I've learned over all these years too." And yeah, it can be a funny thing. So just shout out how great you are. I really appreciated that.MR: I'm glad that I made your day that day and it is what I believe. And I think it's really important that we—I just always come back to there's so many opportunities. When you fight over one opportunity, it's like there's so many opportunities to do the work to encourage people. There's a whole population of people that don't do this. We've only scratched the surface and reached a tiny little fraction even now after 10, 15 years, right?AR: Oh my gosh.MR: And then there's more people getting born every day that don't know about this stuff. Though it is, you know, having an impact in schools. The funny story I could tell here, I don't if I've told this on the podcast before, is I have a 14-year-old daughter in middle school. Last year when she was 13, she came home and said, "Hey dad, they're teaching Sketchnoting in my class. And I told the teacher that she wrote the book on sketchnoting and she didn't believe me."And then I told her that she should go to the library because she knew that I'd sent books there. And the teacher came back and said, "You're right. He did write the book." And she was all real proud that I had a book in this school.AR: That is amazing. Oh, that's the best. That's awesome.MR: So they do get exposed to it, at least in our school. I mean, it's very spotty, all over the country. But I do know school teachers especially get really excited because , you know, when you think about what you're doing with this visual note-taking with sketchnoting is that you're encouraging kids who would normally doodle anyway in a lot of cases.AR: Exactly.MR: To do something productive with it, to use it as a way to focus your attention and to capture ideas. So that's a win. And you know, as you do it, you realize your students actually absorb and understand better and can remember more. So for a teacher, this is like the magic thing, right? How could you not wanna to do that for your students, right?AR: I know, right? How is everybody not doing this, Mike? Right?MR: Yeah. Yeah. So teachers are huge fans and I'm a huge backer of teachers. I haven't done a lot of work with school districts. Through the pandemic, I worked with on school district, but I know that they're out there and I'm excited when I do hear from them. And sometimes I get opportunities to come and speak to their schools. And that's really fun for me because then it brings it full circle to see, okay, it's having an impact on teachers which are having an impact on students and they're getting this option, right.And it's not for everybody. There's some students that doesn't fit with, I understand that. But the ones who do, that could be just a way. I get messages all the time, "Hey, I was a student in university, and using sketchnoting help me survive in my studies." Well, that's what it's all about, so.AR: Yeah. And I think, you know, just overarching, there is so much room in this community, the sketchnoting the graphic recording, the live illustrate , whatever it is, however you want to kind of follow that path, I think there's so much room, and I think you're right in terms of scratching the surface. If this is something that you wanna do or get into.Like even at my workshop, my live in person workshop I did last or I guess week in a bit ago now, you know, there was a woman there and she was like, "Is there room for me?" And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, there is room for you." Like the way that I see it is when people experience the value of it, they want more of it. And then eventually, there's not gonna be enough people who do it professionally.There's just more to go around and the more people experience the power of it, the more it's gonna be required and desired in meeting places and at events and things like that. So I think there is a lot of room for new and upcoming people in this space too, no matter how—there could be hundreds of people out there just doing sketchnoting in classrooms. We need that, we need people who are advocating for it in there you know, so that it—it's just like you said, it's not gonna be for everybody and that's okay, but just like as an option, right. And we know how valuable it is. So, you know, there is so much room in the community for sure.MR: Yeah. I think that's true. Well, this feels like a really good natural point then to shift to what are the tools that you like to use? Let's start with analog first and go to digital. You probably use both, I suspect. I'd just love to hear.AR: I definitely have a pre and post-COVID world story when it comes to—MR: Yeah. Let's tie that in there.AR: Yeah. Well, so pre-COVID, I was 100 percent paper, markers. And then I had started practicing some digital, 'cause I thought at some point someone might ask me, "Hey, do you do digital? "And I'd be primed and ready to go. And then of course, COVID is like, "You are forced to do digital, Miss." Which for me actually was a blessing in disguise because I was traveling so much, having little kids. It was getting a lot.MR: That's tough.AR: So COVID in a sense was a beautiful blessing in disguise 'cause I've still been able to retain some of those clients, and they're doing it in person, but I'm just zoomed in and they're just showing my screen, and it's a beautiful thing. So, of course Neuland, everyone talks about Neuland. The best. What do you say? You know, they're number one. Even for those first one or two years, I just used sketcher markers. That was a beautiful stepping stone.I am scent sensitive, so I think Neuland was a beautiful choice. Not just because the quality is there, but because it's scent free, and that's really important to me. Like, if not, I'd be getting a headache every day I worked and that wouldn't be a good time. So yeah, definitely, Neuland for the win. I do use a little bit of Posca pens here and there, just for highlighting on things. But it—oh.MR: Those are paint markers, right? Am I right?AR: Yeah, they're acrylic paint markers. Unfortunately, they're not refillable. I did get the Neuland acrylics. I don't know if they still sell them. I don't know. I think maybe.MR: I'm not sure.AR: But I did have a bunch of those, but I find the Posca pens just a little bit more vibrant. The consistency is really nice and smooth. So I do usually have a few of those on hand. But that makes up the majority. That's analog set for sure. And of course, like I probably own like every Neuland pen they have because of, you know—MR: They have a pretty wide variety. Yeah.AR: Yeah. And the bullet tip outliner is my favorite because—MR: Me too.AR: — it doesn't matter how you hold it, you can make a mark and it's gonna be a consistent line. I have a lot of the outliner bullet tip.MR: That's my choice in the small and the large, both sizes and so.AR: There you go. There you go. Love it. That's awesome. Yeah. And then for digital, I'm actually a Microsoft girl.MR: Okay.AR: I feel like I'm in the minority over here.MR: Yeah, it's definitely a minority. I think, you know, Android users probably feel the same way.AR: Yeah. So when I was looking for a drawing device, even though I like I said, I do own like every Neuland marker out there, but I also do strive to be a bit of a minimalist. So I was looking for a device that I could do multiple things on. When I found the Microsoft Surface, I was like, it's perfect 'cause it's my computer and it's my drawing tool.And I've never owned an Apple product in my life. So I don't have anything against Apple. I'm sure they're great. Everyone seems to love them, but in terms of like a learning curve, I was like, I just want something that can be all in one.MR: Yeah. That's the way you think.AR: Yeah. Just do the thing and not do with the apps and all the stuff.MR: That makes sense. I think that makes complete sense to me.AR: Yeah. So I started, I think—I can't remember when I got my first surface, it was like maybe 2018 or something like that. But I didn't draw on it a whole lot. Like I said, I was practicing a little bit. But I also invested in a Microsoft Studio. So it's what I'm talking to you on right now. And it's basically like drawing on a TV screen. It's very big.MR: Yes.AR: Because I was getting—the first year of the pandemic I was doing a lot and just being hovered over a small device was just not a good time. So, you know, I was trying to find something out there. I looked at a couple of different options. But when I found the Microsoft Studio, I was like—or the Surface Studio, I guess it's called. I was like, yeah. It's an investment, but I'm very, very happy that I made it. So yeah, it allows me to draw and be able to move my arm around and do lots of things, and not be crunched over a small device.MR: Yeah. It probably feels a little bit like more of a one-to-one relationship to the paper and pens that you had been doing, right? So it's sort of the same scale. I mean, it's more that scale, so—AR: It's more, yeah. It's not as big, but not as small as like a iPad or something, right. So it's probably like four iPad size or something like that. If you were to—MR: Like a 27 inch monitor or something, or 30 inch?AR: I can't remember what it is, but it's pretty big. It's pretty big. And my program of choice is Sketchbook Pro. That's the one I started with. It's the one I use to this day. I'm sure there's other out there that are just as great. But what I usually tell people is just pick one and just do it. Just get through the learning curve. If it's Procreate on the iPad or if it's Microsoft, or if you're Microsoft or Android, and it's Sketchbook. I know they do have Sketchbook Pro for iPad as well, but you know, you just kind of have to pick one unfortunately, and just get through all the little funny things about it until it gets a little bit more intuitive.Because most of my work is live, and that's just kinda how my brain is trained at this point, I don't have time to do all the fancy pens anyway. So I really use one pen, the paintbrush and the eraser, of course. And use a million layers, and that's about it. When I'm doing it live, is very minimal in terms of all these drawing programs, they're amazing and like, so robust, but I really try to encourage people to just, you know, use it minimally. Just do like one or two pens to start and use it in a minimal way. And then you can always just play around and things like that. But yeah, that's my kind of program and setup of choice.MR: Interesting. Interesting. You're the first to talk about, I guess other than the GraphicWall, which is a product that Neuland makes which is like a roll of paper that you can use. I think maybe a few in the 14 season, someone may have mentioned a Cintiq. Which is more for illustration. I think it was—her name will come to me. She's a Welsh woman who uses this at home. And she has an interesting setup with a PC and a large Cintiq, I believe.AR: Oh, interesting.MR: So it's got a stylus. So for those who don't know, before the iPad existed, the Cintiq was like the boss on the block, right. And they made different size. They kept increasing the size. So basically, if I were to describe it, it's like a screen with touch sensitivity. It comes with a dedicated pen, which has a pen tip and an eraser. And basically, what you would do with it, is you'd open up Photoshop and you'd use Photoshop and choose your brushes and stuff and use layers. And so it's like the pre Procreate, I guess, right.It's very expensive, very clunky. You don't really take it any place. It's stuck to your desk. So, you know, if that's the way you work, that's great. If you work in a studio where everything stays in place, it's great. You know, the beauty of the iPad or the Surface, and smaller surfaces and these other devices is you can pick 'em up and go to the cafe or sit in the back of a room and do the work. And it just freed up, you know, the ability to do more with this processing power and the screen resolution and the pen resolution really is matched where those things were for a couple years, so.AR: Yeah. I do have a smaller Surface, like the laptop style and, you know, came in really handy when I had to do an event last week and managed to plug me in and project it on a giant screen in the room. So that was pretty cool. And the setup was like less than 30 seconds. Not gonna lie, that was pretty awesome 'cause usually when you're doing on paper, you're like, okay, I gotta get there early. I gotta get all my board set up, gotta get it all ready. I'll just say there's pros and cons to both.MR: Right. I agree.AR: There's pros and cons to both, right. So you kind of have to weigh what those pros and cons are, and then pick what's gonna work best for your event or whatever it is that you're doing. But yeah, the portability of an iPad or a Surface or something is really beautiful. And you can just pick up and go and plug in or like you said, go to the coffee shop and do your thing or what have you, but if I'm doing like a long day like virtual event or something, it's very nice to have my big Surface Studio, that's for sure.MR: Yeah. It's nice to have options in your case, right? You've got the small portable, you've got the larger scale. You can always revert to paper if you know you wanted to do it that way.AR: Absolutely.MR: I mean, you've got three options right there.AR: Yeah. I have a document camera, I use that quite a bit for different things. So if I'm hosting a workshop online or if I'm doing stuff, I usually do it on paper with my document camera so people can see the marks that I'm making. I think that's a little bit more important when you're teaching a workshop, you're doing something like that so people can see those marks, whereas they don't see them on the digital surface.MR: Yeah, yeah.AR: So it's nice to be able to have the flexibility of both. And, you know, I didn't just wake up one day with all of these tools. I just accumulated them over time.MR: Yes. Over time. Yeah.AR: Right. One year I buy this, the next year I bought that, tight. So, yeah, don't feel like you need to have all of those things either.MR: That's a great tool set and it's good to have some variety. So if someone's listening in and maybe they think the same way you do this will encourage them to explore different directions. That's good.AR: Yeah. Definitely.MR: Well, let's shift into tips now. So every episode we try to have something practical for those who are listening. We collect 'em all at the end of the season and we put 'em in an all the tips episode, of course. What are the three tips, or you can go more than three if you want to, but three tips you might say to someone who—I always frame it like this. Someone's listening, they're individual thinking, but they feel like they're in a bit of a rut or they're on a plateau and they just don't know how to get out of where they're at, and they would use a little encouragement. What would you tell that person?AR: Right. Yeah. Well, I've been having a lot of conversations lately with—I'm just gonna talk from like a beginner perspective, maybe that isn't—MR: Okay. Yeah, that's fine.AR: You know, we'll just talk about that for a second because I've been, of course, like talking to so many people that are like brand new to this, and there seems to be a really big leap between live and not live. So when I teach it, when I talk about it, I always go in with the assumption that they're going to do it live. So I talk about, "Well, you don't have a lot of time, so do this. You don't have a lot of time, so do this." But what I'm finding is that people—that is actually like quite a large ask. Like, learn all these skills, do all the listening thinking, and do it live. Like do it right now.So I've been really working with people to encourage them to do whatever you need to do. Make notes on sticky notes, do the traditional way you would capture, type them out. Do whatever you need to do to get the information and then you can always create the sketchnote later. It's great, yeah, to do it in the moment, but if that is like too much of an ask and it feels too scary, give yourself permission to capture in a way that you feel comfortable and with the idea that you're going to create a sketchnote of it later.So maybe the purpose of creating the sketchnote is a little bit different. It's less about the immediate understanding, which is one of the things that I love about sketchnoting and visual thinking in general is that, making it so it's you have that learning in the moment. So you know, you're gonna be doing your learning maybe a little bit later when you're creating your sketchnote. But I've just been having to give people a lot of permission lately, like, "Don't worry about doing it live, do whatever you want, then create it," right?And then you can focus on the aesthetics or the things, or if you're doing it digitally, you can move things around and you can feel it. You know, 'cause if you create one and you feel good about it, you're gonna do another one. But if you do it live and it's clunky and it's messy and you feel horrible about it, you're not gonna do it again. Or it's gonna be a really difficult to kind of get back to it.You know, I think we have this idea that it always has to be live. And I think especially when people are new, that is a big ask. And it doesn't always have to be, right. Like, when I got into it, that was my default, and that's just what I do. And now I'm just like so in tuned to it that I feel like I—you know, we forget that that isn't gonna come and there's like a little too scary for some people to just learn all the things now do it live, you know? So I would say that, you know, however you need to create it, do that. Even if it's live, that's okay if it's not live.One thing that I don't know, maybe is a little controversial, but I'm gonna share this one, something that I've been thinking a lot about lately is what might be considered like cliche drawings. So I gave the example, I've got like a light bulb. And I think because I'm working with beginners so much right now, is that I've really been leaning in on the idea that cliches are okay.Like, drawing something that might be considered a cliche, I think is awesome. Because I think it's that leap again, right? If you've been in this community for a long time, you're likely challenging yourself, like, "Oh, how could I draw this to explain this concept? Or bring these ideas together into like—" I know he had Dario, he does these like beautiful visual metaphors.MR: Metaphors, yeah.AR: Right. Like how we can visualize these concepts. And I think that is beautiful thing. But I think for people that are newer, that's just like too much. They can't even think about that 'cause they don't even know how to draw a light bulb yet. You know what I mean? And, you know, the light bulb icon saved me because like I said, I'm not joking. I drew one on everything I did for years because I felt confident in drawing a light bulb.There was always an aha moment or something I wanted to stick out on the page, and that's where I would put my little light bulb. So I think like leaning in and those basics or things that might be considered cliches, I think that's okay. I think we can always be challenging ourselves and how we wanna draw things, but leaning in on some of those like rudimentary or basic drawings of how people who've been doing it for a while, I think that's totally fine. Because you have to start somewhere, right?You can't just like, oh, I'm gonna go from not knowing sketchnoting at all, now I'm gonna create these really complex drawings. There's has to be this ladder or this stepping stone approach. So if you needed permission to draw something that might be considered a cliche, I highly encourage it.MR: Yeah. Well, Dario always says that, you know, metaphors is the next level. So the audience he's going after are people that feel confident about the cliche stuff, but they wanna rise up to another level. And that's cool, right.AR: I love that. Yeah.MR: Maybe for many people, the cliches are just fine for the audience and the work they do, and they never feel the need and not doing it professionally. Like, it's fine.AR: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, yeah, it's beautiful to have that opportunity kind of like step up your next—because I'm like, you know, I'm in a space, like I don't wanna keep drawing the same thing over and over again. Like, that's not a good time. I wanna challenge—MR: For you, it's something, a challenge. Yeah. It's good for—AR: Something that I wanna do, but yeah, someone who is more new or even just have been doing it for a year or two or, you know, it can be—you know, just remind yourself, don't make this more complicated than you need to, especially when you're doing it live. Like just, you know, building that visual vocabulary over time and starting with something that might be considered a cliche, you know.And hopefully, you get into that not comparing mode, right. We already talked about it could be a tip of course of really trying not to compare—you know, like when I went to the 2015 Austin, Texas, it was like, I really was on this really funny line of intimidation and inspiration. And when you're in intimidated, can you flip it upside down and turn it into inspiration instead. Just threw another tip in there for you too.Maybe the last thing I'll just mention, which maybe feels like an off topic from what we've talked about so far, but one thing that I tend to spend a lot of time on is letters. And if you have nice clean letters, your sketchnotes gonna look awesome, no matter if you don't have a lot of drawings on it or a lot of drawing elements like lines and containers and things.So I spend unfortunate amount of time with people to try to just help them clean up their letters a little bit. Because I always find that people have this really funny relationship to their handwriting. It's like, you love it, you hate it. It's in between. It's a funny thing with people's relationship with their handwriting. So you almost have to get people—you have to get comfortable with like, "This is my handwriting. I don't wanna embrace my own style, but I'm just gonna like, try to clean things up a little bit."Every time you make a letter, it looks the same every time. Or picking up your pen and doing like, things like that. Because there's so much content that's always captured, if you feel really confident about your letters, then everything else will just go from there. But every time you go to write something down, you're feeling not great about it, then you know, that's like—I guess like I'm just in this head space right now of how do we just encourage people to do more, have a good experience.And if you have nice clean letters, then I think you'll have a more positive experience with it too. So I think all of my years in early childhood education also primed me for this work too 'cause my letters were pretty decent going into it, so I literally had to practice them and all that good stuff. It maybe a bit of off topic from what we've talked about, but I just wanted to mention it 'cause it's something that seems to be coming up for me a lot lately with people.MR: Yeah. I think one of the practices I did, I haven't done this for a long time when we did workshops in person, was I had people do sketchnotes with no drawings. All they could do is lettering, and they could make it bigger, they could do all kinds of stuff with it, but it had to be a letter. And then you start to realize like, well actually letters are really drawings at some degree once you get to a certain scale. So you're technically breaking the rule, but you're not breaking the rule, which is fun when people realized it. And maybe that's an exercise I need to reintroduce, I don't know, but.AR: Yeah. No, it's a good one. I always say like letter or letters are drawings in the skies. Exactly, what you said basically. If you can write letters, you can draw. It is pretty darn foundational sketchnoting getting the information down and finding that speed where you can capture quickly, you know, but it's still fairly legible. It's this kind of song and dance.I always kind of end up talking about lettering and stuff a lot in the beginning when I'm with people. Which, you know, may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it's pretty darn important. So I'm like, "Just bear with me. Let's just get through this and develop the skill a little bit before we kind of go into drawing." 'Cause I feel like people, they see it and they go immediately to drawing. They're like, "Oh, I just wanna draw stuff that's exciting."And in my book, I put little, "draw little icons," I put at the very end of the book. It was very intentional why it's at the end of the book because I didn't wanna start it with it because then you need to get some of that foundational stuff down first before you—'cause if you just learn a bunch of icons and none of the other stuff, you know, like how ideas connect together and all of that, then you know, it's not gonna be as beneficial. And you might burn out quicker because you're putting too much pressure that you have to draw a bunch of stuff. And it's not about that at all.MR: Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Another good observation. I don't know if it quite qualifies as a tip, but I guess it is.AR: Sure why not? Lots of tips.MR: Pile another one on there.AR: Yeah, that's what I got for you today. That's what I got for you today.MR: Good. Well, that's great. That's really encouraging. Well, this is the point in the podcast where we ask how people can find you so they can make connections, say hello, check out your book, look at your work. All that kind of stuff. Our community always loves new people. And so, what would be the best place, places for people to find you and to see your work?I got a few different ways. So my business is Minds Eye Creative, so mindseye,creative.ca 'cause I'm in Canada. All things Minds Eye Creative, that's where you can find me. And some of examples of my work for clients and things like that. And then Sketchnote.School is all things learning how to sketchnote. I've got my newsletter. I sent out a Sketchnote tip every Saturday. And you can learn about my book on there, "The Beginner's Guide to Sketchnoting," and you know, it's on Amazon and all those places too.MR: Cool.AR: And information about my community on there at Sketchnotes School as well. And I recently rebranded my YouTube channel. I'm gonna try to redo some YouTube things to Sketchnotes. So doing more under Sketchnotes School these days than Mind's Eye Creative.MR: Cool. Well, those are good two or three good places. We'll look for you on YouTube. If you wanna send along you know, some links to me, we'll make sure that they get in the show notes. But we all of course, do our research here and try to provide pretty detailed shownotes so people can find things, soAR: Absolutely. I love that.MR: That's perfect. Well, thanks so much Ashton, for being on the show. It's been great to talk with you and hear your story and just hear your unique perspective and how you approach things and all the way down to the tools that you use that are a little different. That's really cool. I think it's important that we see variety and that we're not a homogenous thing. We're a variety where it's a community of people and all have different perspectives. And that's great because we need those perspectives to keep growing and improving the work we do. So thanks for being part of that community and the work you do.AR: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Had such a good time.MR: Good. Well, for everyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon.

In this episode, Rev Andy Gray, who obsessively drew as a kid, shares an incredible 30-year journey of graphic designing and how his art has evolved to become an editorial cartoonist, coach, and graphic illustrator.Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is AndyOrigin StoryAndy’s current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find AndyOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.Andy's Website Andy’s LinkedInAndy's InstagramAndy's FacebookBenjamin FelisBooks by Quentin BlakeTom's Inky thinkingToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Neuland markersGraphic WallBallpoint pensColor pencilsCamera back backRock N Roller trolleyTipsPractice using long-form, business-based YouTube videos.Network with other people.Photograph your work and link to it.Practice the "Something about" technique.CreditsProducer: Alec Pulianas Shownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerSubscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike and I'm here with Andy, a.k.a Rev Gray. Andy, how are you doing?Andy Gray: I'm doing all right. Thank you.MR: It's good to have you. We were connected by Patty and Grant, good friends of mine who actually just finally met in Holland, just this fall. So really good to make that connection and have people out there. I've always got people out there suggesting people I'd have on the show.So thank you, Grant and Patty. Probably more Grant than Patty, I suppose. But Rev, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do, and then go right into your origin story? How did you get here doing what you're doing, and all interesting tidbits along the way?AG: Yeah. We're gonna go back a long time. So who I am, and what do I do? I'm a graphic recorder and I'm a children's and grownup book illustrator, and I illustrate magazines as well. Think of me—I don't know whether you've ever heard of a guy called Quentin Blake.MR: Quentin Blake, I don't know that name. It sounds familiar, but I don't know him.AG: If I say "Charlie in the Chocolate Factory."MR: Oh yeah.AG: And I say Roald Dahl, and I say, the person who illustrated Roald Dahl then immediately you start to get to know who Quentin Blake is.MR: Got it.AG: He's just turned 90, actually.MR: Wow.AG: And so if you take his style and you mix it with people from the other side of the pond, 'cause obviously I'm a Britt, people from the other side of the pond from your side say, "Oh, you look just like the New Yorker." So think of me as an editorial cartoonist illustrator, and you won't be far off.I'm also a Church of England Minister. I've been in youth and children's ministry for decades, and I plant churches and stuff, and I train people and coach people. And basically, I try and help everybody to live life in their fullest. I'm also a DJ, magician, a dad, husband, and general mad person. I do everything I can. I get bored easy.MR: Well, you fit right in the Sketchote Army podcast and in the Sketchote community, 'cause we're all quirky. I've been reminded of that when I just came back from Laiden, from the International Sketchnote Camp there. And loved everybody. You know, we're really community minded, but we're all quirky in our own ways. So you fit right in.AG: Fantastic. Yeah, I've kind of got this target, and next time you do something like that, I wanna be there. So I was too late to take advantage this time, but I'll be there next time.MR: Sounds good. Well, why don't you get into, like, where did you start from? You can go back as far as when you were a little baby, I suppose if you remember.AG: We were talking just before we started rolling, weren't we? Okay, so this will make some people either laugh or they'll be sick. If you're eating at the moment, do stop. Have you finished your mouthful? Excellent. Good. Right. Because my mother tells me very reliably that the first time that I really I got into art was when I was in my cot when I was about two years old. In fact, probably younger, actually, I was just a toddler. So maybe about 18 months.And when she put me down for a nap in the afternoon, I would take the contents of my nappy and I would smear them all over the walls. So, you know, it is early start in my expressionist period using brown pigment and various shades. So funny enough, she stopped putting me down after that. I guess then I mean, I've only just in the last what? In the last five years, been diagnosed having autism or being autistic. I'm actually autistic because we prefer Asperger's or neuros-spicy. Which makes sense for a lot of the things which I'm gonna talk to you about. But I couldn't sleep as a little kid, which is quite normal for autistic people, you know? And so, I'd wake up about 1:00 in the morning and I'd have pens and paper, and I remember so often I just would be sound asleep for about four hours. So I'd get my pens and paper and I would just draw continually for about four hours. And then mum would come in and she'd see me that I'd be falling asleep with pens and paper all over my bed. And so, the next thing would happen the next night. So I obsessively drew, and that's kind of like always been my story. I couldn't draw that well. I used to always be jealous of my friends at school. They could draw really well and I couldn't, probably bit rubbish till I was about 14. And then it started with me copying Bino. Have you ever come across Bino? If I say comic, the problem is, it's sort of like around the world, comics are kind of like superheroes and stuff. In the UK, we talk about comics and we're talking about sort of like cartoon characters in strip cartoons you might call them.MR: Yes. We had this in the newspaper. I don't know Bino, though. That's not a character I know.AG: Right. Okay. So it is that kind of style. So Dan de Bino UK people know exactly what I'm talking about. So think for you, it's the kind of simplistic style that you get with peanuts.MR: Yes.AG: And we have magazines full of that which is just fun. And I used to copy Backstreet Kids which people will know the name of over here, and I could get it so that I could draw them without needing to reference them. And so, I just did that and, you know, covered all my school books in Backstreet Kids and other illustrations. And then you weren't supposed to, I went to a Deb Posh private school, and you weren't supposed to do that. And I did. It wasn't naughty, but I just didn't get told off for it 'cause they like recipe me work as well. So I drew all of this stuff. And then when I was 14 like I said, I couldn't really draw. And then my little sister was born and my dad took me away. And when he took me away, he I bought a book o pencil drawing pencils. So we just done a whole day for two or three days, and I just started drawing from that book. And suddenly, literally overnight, it clicked and I was able to draw anything I wanted in pencil, you know, realistically or not realistic, however I wanted. So the first gig came in maybe about six months after that from somebody, and she wanted a picture of Peter Rabbit. So I drew it and she paid me 10 quid. I thought, "Ooh, this is easy."MR: Wow.AG: So, yeah. So back in the '80s, 10 quids is nothing to be shy of. So I did bits and pieces here and there, but I really wanted to be an editorial cartoonist. So when I got married in my early 20s, I self-study the style of how to be an editorial cartoonist. And it went really well. But I ended up working so hard. I was also working for a company called British Gas. And it was a regional office, and this, it was the size of a warehouse and it was just open-plan office space.So, if you can imagine what that was like and what that did, I was right in the middle of it, what that did to an autistic brain, not knowing it was autistic at the time. And I was trying to get this editorial cartoon business going. And we didn't have internet in those days. Do you remember that?MR: Yeah.AG: We didn't have internet, did we?MR: I was there.AG: In the very early '90s, I had a fax machine. I was dead proud. And that was it, that's all we had. And so, trying to get the business in was really hard. And although I sort of like did—you know, the newspaper did pick up for a couple of issues, that was it. And I ended up burning out really badly.And during that period, I couldn't have time off work with stress, somebody came to me and said, "Look, you know, find out what God really wants you to do." So I'm a Christian, like I said, I'm a minister. They said, "Find out what God really wants you to do." Within two weeks I'd worked out that really, "I need you to put the pens down," and just say, "God, what do you want me to do?" And within two weeks somebody came back and said, "Why don't you train for youth and children's ministry?"So it's like, "Hmm, all right then that sounds right." And it came from so many places, people saying it, they didn't know each other, so I thought, "We're gonna do it." So dived into going training and I sat in the lecture theater, listening to theology. And it's sort of like getting fairly bored. 'Cause theology is quite a boring thing, really. While everybody was taking notes, I didn't know taking notes. I learned how to mind map, I also learned memory techniques, and all sorts of other things. Just trained myself in the whole lot. But then when the thing interesting was happening, I just started drawing.And so, I didn't draw anything particular. I just drew in the same way as I used to drawing my school books. So that was great. And then I found myself drawing a little bit for the college 'cause they wanted little bits and pieces done. So that was okay. Then I went to go and be a youth and children's minister, and I found that the art stuff that I did then became what I was doing as part of my ministry.And so, that lasted for, I think about, we'll do rough figures about 10 years, and then I went to go and work for a Christian publishing organization. So they got about 10 million, 12 million pound turnover. And they did publishing as well as training people. So I trained people around the country and in the Northwest of the UK in working with young people and children and how to do it and how to help them get a life of fullness and all the rest of it.And they found out that I could draw. And so, they said, "Would you mind drawing a book for us?" "Oh, that's quite good. Draw a book for you". And they paid nicely for them. Oh, that's all right, isn't it? And they said, "Would you do some more drawing for us?" And so, I had this side hustle of drawing at the same time, and it all went through their book. So I didn't have to do any bookkeeping or anything. And that was very nice.At the same time, as we drew to the end of, I was doing more and more drawing for them. I was also learning how to be an entrepreneur and developing those skills of running businesses, but also lots of side hustles. So I got things going and I was trading mp3 players and all sorts of other things on the side. It was great.And then I got a calling to go and get a dog collar. So, you know, it's the whole dog collary thing to be a church minister besides just a youth and children's worker. So, for me, it wasn't really an upgrade, it was just a development of ministry, and I was doing something else, but I was gonna become a pioneer, an ordained pioneer minister, which means planting churches in interesting places like coffee shops and things like that, rather than just going running normal churches.And I knew that I didn't really wanna be in full-time, paid ministry because it ties you to the church. And I'm a minister for people who don't go to church. That's the kind of person I am. Anyway, I trained in theology. And while I was doing it, I went back to drawing at the back of the lecture theaters 'cause it's boring. I could write the papers, no problem, do the study and stuff.And then one day, 'cause I mean it was pretty small, things that we were doing, small cohort. It was only about 40 of us. And we were just really good friends. So I was about 40-odd at the time. And I was really good friends with the lecturers, you know, 'cause we all just got on together. It is that kind of format when you're doing this kind of training.And one of the lecture one day turned around, he said, "Would you draw what I say?" I said, "Sorry, what?" He said, "Would you draw what I say?" He said, "Well, yeah, instead of just drawing," he said, "I'd love to see what it looked like if you drew what I said." Oh, all right. So I drew what he said and he's like, "Oh, that's quite interesting."So I then just started drawing what people said. Instead of drawing sort of like—I mean, I dunno whether people are familiar with what you might call Christian art drawn and painted in sermons and the like, but it's usually quite squirly-worrly. And it's usually got hands in it and it's usually got a dove in it. Sometimes it might be the story and that's about it and it's art. But I wanted something else. So I started drawing art and then combining key phrases in there and making it part of the arts and doing that. And I just built on that. And then when I was ordained and I was a trainee vicar, if you like. So the best way of putting it, so cure it. Sometimes I wasn't lecturing , I wasn't actually leading, and I wasn't preaching. So I'd sit there bored again. I can't stand church. I'm a minister who hates church I get bored. That's why people love my sermons and my talks and the way I lead church 'cause I get bored quicker than anybody else does. So that's great.So I sat there drawing instead, and because I got in this habit of drawing what people said, I started drawing the sermon. And I would start by seeing, so we'd have a bit of a Bible story or a Bible passage, and then I'd draw the outline of that. Then I'd start putting in smaller elements of what was preached on within that bigger picture and where necessary adding words.Great. Did that for about 10 years, you know. And then I found that throughout all of this, with the theology side of things and stuff, people started saying, "Andy, can we have a copy, please? It'll help us remember." Brilliant. There's no skin off my nose, you know. So they'd take copies, then they'd share them around and all the rest of it.I did another job coming out of that because, after 10 years of church planting and all the rest of it, that was great. And then I decided that it was time to start moving away from being a paid minister. And I wanted to achieve being a self-supporting minister so that I wasn't tied to the whole—there's quite a lot of management involved in the Church of England now because you have to look after more than one church. And so, there's a huge number of meetings, and everything else. I thought that's not me. I have to sort of like, be freelance, if you like. So little bit of prayer, "What do you want me to do, God?" And answer came back looking to try and work towards being self-employed and stuff. And then what should I do? You know, be an illustrator. I'm not sure I wanna be an illustrator again.And then within two weeks of this conversation somebody came to me and said, "Andy, you don't remember me from college days 20 years ago. We were in the year below you. We've just found you on Facebook. Do you still draw pictures?" Well, oddly enough, "Yes. I've just started getting back into drawing pictures and being paid for it." "Oh, great. Could you illustrate our book for us, please?" " Don't wanna Illustrate books."Spoke to a mate of mine. He turned around, he said, "You gotta illustrate." He said, "You can do whatever God sends you." Oh, all right then. Okay, fair enough. I did this one book, and it's not stopped ever since.MR: One thing leads to another.AG: Yeah. Slowly the price has gone up. Every time I've finished one book, another book—I mean, I've got, I think it's eight projects sitting on my desk at the moment of books people want illustrating. It's a nightmare. Anyway, can't complain. So what happened was, though that as I got out of this, so this was what? This was five years back. And I dropped down to working for the Southwest of England, training people in churches and to talk about their faith. Fun enough.But carried on training people. And I've got a way of coaching and a way of styling how I train people. It's all the same thing. It's selling them the idea that they can actually do it. It's great. And so I can do that. During this time, I was illustrating more and more books. And then September last year, I realized that I'd started—the grant funding was running out this coming summer. So the summer is just gone.And I realized I'd have to leave even earlier than I thought before the money ran out. So I said to the guy who was my line manager at the time, I said, "In one week I've turned down 3000 pounds worth of money. I can't keep going like this. I think I have to leave early." He's a brilliant Christian man. He said, "I think you do actually excellent and we'll help you to do it." What? So like, oh great. All right. Okay.And I thought, "Well, I wanna see what God wants as well. So I said, "Okay, God, what do you want me to do next?" So illustration itself, I mean, I developed this very fast illustration style because the way of making ends, meters and book illustrates is you've gotta be fast and people have to like what you do. So I'd really gone to this point of really refining my art style into a very, very posh art style, which took ages to do, and was very pretty. And people said, "Yeah, that's really nice. I really like that." And I get paid for it. But it wasn't quick enough to make an income. And then we were just finished with the diocese, paid for us all to do coaching. Coaching, training. So I'm a trained coach. I'm not a coach, qualified coach 'cause I've not done the hours. But I'm a trained coach 'cause I've done the training. So take it as you leave it. So don't call yourself a coach, but you know how to do it.And during that time, we had to practice coaching each other. And there were two really significant things that came up. One of them we'll might mention later, which is something about phrasing coaching. So it would be good to come back to that because I think it's a top tip is that one.MR: Okay.AG: But the other thing was I was trying to work out how to make ends meet. And I was in this coaching session with this bloke. He was coaching me, I was just having fun. And I said I have to work out how to make ends meet. It was then I realized that I had to dump my style of being very posh and fast, very posh and nice and digging ages, charge more, much more, and drop back to the fastest speed that I developed when I was 18, 19, 20 years old of this editorial cartoonist.And it just so happened that the 20 years previously—20 years? 15 years previously, as I'd been doing the book illustrations, I got so fed up with posh illustrations what basically burned me out a bit on the illustration, that I picked up a book and this is gonna be one of my recommended books by a guy called Quentin Blake to basically for the people who couldn't draw.Now I could draw, but what it did is it was so close to my style and I hadn't realized, I thought, well I'll read this book and you're drawing in it at the same time. It's brilliant. And you draw and you read at the same time, you draw what he tells you to. By the end of it, within 36 hours, my style had completely relaxed, and was 20 times faster than it was before.And I started putting it on Facebook and people weren't just going, "Oh, that's nice." They went, "Oh wow, that's so awesome." And I'm like going, okay, faster, people think it's awesome and I can charge more, brilliant. So that became my style. And you'll see how that's relevant in a minute because 12 months ago, not sure what I was gonna do next. I of course start praying, saying, "God, what should I do next?" You know, and said, "Oh, I give up. I've got no idea what to do next. It's your job."And within 24 hours, somebody gave me a call. I called him Matt Pritchard, and he gave me a phone call. And he said, "Andy", he said, "You drew for me 15 years ago a logo." And we've been in touch ever since. We're both magicians. He's much better than me. Much better. He's a member of the magic circle. I'm not. And he said, "Can you draw conversations?"I said, "Oh, don't know. I've got no idea. What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, have a look at the Bible project." So I went on there and said, well that's the kind of style. Okay, right. And he said, "Do you wanna have a go?" And I said, "Well, let me look into it and see if anybody else has done it now." So I thought, what could he refer to? And I thought, well, what is it? lsn't it a live illustration, maybe? So I looked it up and went, "Hang on, it's got a name. It's called graphic recording. I've been doing this for the last 30 years. What? And it's an industry. This is so cool."So I jumped in with Benjamin Felis' course 'cause I had no idea. So I like to learn fast. And because of doing all the artwork, and so, I built up some money in the business for training and stuff. So I bought his course. So props to Ben on that one. His main thing was that really helped me was the reference to three books. To a few books. And I saw a line finally between a TED Talk and what he was saying, how it was done. And I went, "Ah, I do do this already. It's not just called drawing in church, which I've called it for years. I can do it." So I've not even come across you by that point, you know?MR: Sure.AG: More conversation with Matt, and I said, "I'd like to do it on iPad 'cause then we can try it out and just link it through a video projector." And he said, "Well, I think it should be done on paper or on canvases or something. So I looked around, and well, you could do it on a big foam core board, but I thought, well, the people we are doing it with, were gonna be young people talking about faith and science and the link between the two. And I thought I can't draw it like that for you. Because they would feel guilty if they threw it away. Anyway, I said, we'll do it on iPad. Anyway, it was in January just gone that I was going to a conference, and I thought, "Well, I know they won't mind if I sit at the back. But I wanna do it a bit more than just on a piece of paper. I don't wanna draw an iPad. I can do it on paper and see what it feels like." So I got myself four pieces of foam cardboard, which is about A1 size on its side. But then I also got the paper and I used the foam call board as my board, a real lightweight board, and my previous easel of broker. So I bought myself a new easel dropped another a hundred quid on market pens and some paper. And I said to the guy, the tech guys that back said, do you mind if I just sit at the back with you? You know, it wasn't a big space. Only about 200 people there for a three-day conference and said, "Can I just sit at the back with you and just draw?" Anyway, so I did. Quick cut ahead, the result of doing that means that the main people presenting then found out what I was doing. The fact that I could draw, become really good friends. And I've ended illustrating for them and recouping about 5,000 pounds worth of work of them.That's beside the point, the graphic recording stuff. I've done books for them. They go internationally. So I'm an international illustrator, you see. I was at the back drawing and then somebody came up and saw what I was doing and they went, "Oh wow. Can I take a photo? I thought you were just doing normal Christian art, like everybody else's but this is different."And then I even had one person—so people start taking photographs and I've got these small pieces of paper, I say small, but A1s or landscape all over the place being drawn in this style. I do focus on the art first, but I was trying at that point to say it was kind of like there was a bit of a popcorn method going on. But I wanted it to be artistic. By that point, I hadn't quite managed to smush these two things together. You know, the style I used to do together with actually sort like trying to get data that people can hook in with. So I was like, "Oh, my word. Okay, yeah short Cushing photographs. For an artist, people taking photographs of your work is like, that's the best ever. You don't care about selling if you just, I mean, you want to sell stuff. You have people taking photographs, and you get excited. And then I asked this lady, come up, looked at this picture, and burst into tears. I thought, "By it, what I done now." And I said, why? She said, "I can never follow anything that's said in these sort of things. And I feel so guilty about it. What you have done have made it so that I can remember what was said."MR: Wow. AG: And one of the things that my friend guided me on—well another friend actually, I got too many millionaire friends and one particular millionaire friend said to me, when I was trying to work out what to do, he said, "Well, how does your art serve people?" And I said, "Well, I dunno, really."And digging around then we discovered that doing the art as the books is I help people tell their stories. So that's my tagline. But I realized that this person, I'd done an act of translation and later I found it was actually even similar to the way she reacted, was even similar to someone you get sign language if they're hard of hearing or deaf or deafened, because some people, they can't manage to remember what's said. And so, doing this meant that it wasn't just exciting, and oh, look, my words have been drawn. And more recently I've discovered a better word is interface. But we can come onto that one as well if you like. So anyway, so I thought, well, I've never managed to do nine hours a day for three days on an iPad. It would've done my head in. So we're gonna do paper. So I phoned up, I can't remember whether you've had him on or not, but Tom from Inky thinking?MR: No, I need to have him on. I need to have him.AG: He would be cool. He'll be cool. I'll link you later at another point. MR: Okay. AG: But they're one of two suppliers in the UK for Neuland products. MR: Hmm. Okay.AG: And I spoke to them, and he was really good. And after talking to him, I decided I was gonna actually invest in the graphic wall. MR: Yeah. I've heard that.AG: LW hyphen X, you know, this sounds very cool, but you can expand it in all sorts of things. I mean, I've got now got five panels, so I go out four meters by one and a quarter-meters tall. So this thing's huge. I've even got the winders on the ends now, so I can do 25 meters nonstop, which is just so cool.MR: And for those who are watching or listening who don't know what the GraphicWally, I think is, was the name of it. It's like—AG: Well, the GraphicWally is the little thing. MR: It's the little one. Okay.AG: It's quite narrow and small. I'm talking about the free-standing job basically. MR: Big guy. AG: If you take a flip chart board and basically, you just stack them for 4 meters.MR: Five AG: It's five. Yeah. That's what I've got. All right. And it just keeps going. It's awesome.MR: And I think it's got like a winder, isn't it? A roll of paper that you can continuouslywind it. AG: It doesn’t unless you drop the funds on the new stuff, so. MR: Oh, okay. AR: So be aware this stuff isn't cheap. I think I've dropped about five grand on equipment so far. MR: Yeah. I think that's the key of the GraphicWally, is it's a smaller one. I think they intended it for a camera or something, right? AR: Yeah, that's right. MR: Because I know Ben Felis has it, and it's got like a crank. It's got a roll of paper on one side and a roll on the other. And it's sort of like old school film, you know, you would drag it across and take pictures. AG: Yeah. Well, if you 10 x that, literally 10 x it, you get what I've got now. MR: Oh God. AR: And the thing is that, I mean, this is a top tip for anyone wanting to go into graphic recording, go with looking like you know what you need to do. Now apparently, I might be wrong on this, but apparently Disney discovered this. So I go full lo place. So Disney they had a little bit of full feedback. Apparently, Disney, Europe, I think had some feedback. The people thought that it was dirty. So what they did, they got more cleaners in and people still said it was dirty. So they then put their cleaners in yellow jackets. Everybody said it was clean. One of the things that I've established in the past is a Ballgame Cafe. So a community Ballgame Cafe. I mean, I made the money through affiliate processes at Amazon to buy the ballgame for the Ballgame Café. Is great, and just left it there. So, community thing. But we recognized that if people came along to the cafe for the first time, 'cause the popup cafe and looked, I went, "Oh, look, you've got just a few games, haven't you?" They won't be impressed. In the end, we've got about 3000 pounds worth of games all through me raising entrepreneurial funds. So it all works. And raise these funds to buy all these games. So people came in, it's like a sweet shop, they went, "Oh wow." Got excited and then stayed. And it wouldn't have been in the same way. And, you know, take the tip from Disney. I mean, I heard about Disney later, but I've always had since then, make it look like you know what you're doing by having the right kit. The idea of all the gear and no idea isn't quite true. Because actually, if you go in and you've just got sort of like ropey stuff, you can have all the ideas and the, the professionals will look and go, yeah, I haven't got a clue. And so, you won't have that start of a 10 of them getting that first impression. You have a good set of kit, and they will look and say, you know what you're doing, and therefore they'll come with that mindset. It is called the Pygmalion Effect, I do believe. So look that one up. Quite interesting. So anyway, so I invested in this kit, went and did this gig elsewhere in the country for my mate Matt. And we first of all worked with those from primary school age up to about 11 years old. And it was brilliant. It was great fun. And then we did it again, and this time with teenagers. And the teenagers got well into the conversations. It was really deep, it was a really heavy day that they were talking about, science and faith and really digging deep. I mean, they did heavy lifting. And I just drew it. It was a bit more text than I liked on it, but it didn't matter. And we ended up with this really big board of that particular one was three and a half meters long with all of their conversations throughout the whole day. And illustrated all illustrated. And at the end of it, these 16, 17-year-olds came up and photographed their own work.MR: Wow. AG: And it's like, hang on a minute, you know, you have done really heavy lifting and you've been excited about taking photographs of this work at the end of the day. And the holy grail of a young person's phone is their photo albums. And it's like, I don't believe this. So it kind of like went on from there. Then I started drawing for different people and carrying on sort of like, 'cause I mean, once you've invested, I mean, at that point it was about 2000 pounds. MR: Now you have to use that stuff. AG: Yeah. I've gotta use it. You know, even if it just benefits people. And I discovered I started putting things on LinkedIn about, you know, sort of like what I was discovering on the way through learning stuff still out, you know, building up relationships with a number of people. So, you know, Grant was one of those people on the way through and Patty as well. And then there were other people. A guy called James Duro. Brilliant, brilliant chap. He worked in South Africa. He's just wonderful, wonderful man. And so, he's been doing it for 25 years. And Dario, I know you've had Dario on.MR: Of course, yeah. Dario. I've had in on, yeah.AG: Yeah. You've had him on. And he was just like really helpful. I didn't take part in his course. He just helped, which is just brilliant, you know? MR: Yeah. AG: So at some point I gonna be jumping in with him just to just pay for his course, say thank you for everything he's helped me with for free, you know? MR: Yeah. AG: And it was just been a right old journey. So in one sense, I've been doing this thing for 20, 30 years, and in another sense, I've been doing it for 12 months, which is bizarre. But I think for me, the most exciting thing was, you know, I did a very big gig on Thursday. So like just this last Thursday, gone, and they had sort of like these major, I mean, you've probably heard of BP and maybe Iceland. I dunno if you've heard of Iceland. MR: Yeah. AG: They had those kinds of people, really top-level people, and my top-level managers there at the same time. And there's a guy there from I won't say which big company it was, but the feedback you gave, I'm just gonna read this to you 'cause this actually kind of like encapsulates everything I'm trying to do. So remember, I'm trying to make art. So I'm coming from an artist's point of view. I'm coming from an artist's perspective rather than I'm trying to communicate. And we can talk about, actually no, you do do art. Don't care what everybody says about how we are not an artist. Yes, you are. And I'll tell you why. But this is what this guy said to me. He said, okay. So he said this, "What became more apparent to me through the day with the benefit of using illustration to help capture and enhance the message, creating a new perspective, and helping people make necessary connections to understand the story."So this was a day of virtual, nothing but data. And I was thinking, "How do I illustrate data?" And pictures were forming, so I just drew them. He said, "And although individuals may have taken away something different, it highlighted to me that a different perception of reality is often needed. People of the nervous system of any organization. Yet often the importance of people, their perception of reality and how they connect everything together is underestimated." So what I do is I turn what people are saying into art. I will use as few words as possible to make it make sense so that it creates a bit of a dissonance. People have to solve the puzzle. Because when you solve puzzles, you get endorphins. You then, this is how Wordle works. You then share it with somebody next. You say, oh, I solved it. And they go, oh, I've solved it as well. And then they talk about it. Then endorphins work and community works, and then it becomes human. And I realized at that point that from what I got the other day, I thought, that's what I'm doing. It's is interpretation, but even more so, it's interface between data and information, and even if it's told in story and creating an interface between that and people who are listening and watching, and it's making it more human. So in a world of AI, when we're going faster and faster towards AI, me going in with my analog tools of paper on purpose, 'cause it's a choice I've made, makes it so that it makes that stuff more human. And the more human we can make things, I think that's the way forward for the future. MR: I would think that because it's physical and it becomes more visceral, right? Like if you had done this on an iPad and even broadcast it on the same size screen, it might've had a similar impact, but there's something about that physical, like you can go up and touch it. Like those kids, those teenage kids can go up and touch their words that were drawn by you and maybe they can even feel the ink, right? You know, like theres something tangible about it, right? Because the other thing is so much of our world is intangible, right? It's these photons and pixels and bits that we have control of, but they can change or they can disappear at any moment. And that's aren't real are real.AG: One of real the big influences was when we had when Australian side paper or digital paper or digital. The team who's doing the school's work stuff sent me through one of their promo videos. And on it, one of the teachers, the head teachers from a previous session had said, what I love about this and this wasn't my drawing or anything else, this was pre-me getting involved, says that we spend so much of our time on iPads and screens to have the kids be able to come in and talk in and explore in an analog way. Is fantastic. So when it was being suggested to me by one of the other team members, oh, let's just do it on iPad. It was like, but then we're just going back to the thing that the teacher said was not the unique selling thing. So I thought, I've gotta do it on paper because it has to be unique. And that's kinda like, just captured me. I've always been, for the last 30 years, whenever the world goes in one direction, I go in the other direction on literally on purpose. So what are you all doing? We're not going digital. I'm not. So if somebody says, "Will you record this virtual? Will you do this virtual event for us digitally?" I'll go, "Nope." "We'll pay you money for it." "Nope." I'm only doing paper and I'm only doing in person. That's it. And I'm only doing it on big sheets as well. So if you don't like it, I'm not doing it.MR: Interesting. AR: Find your people, dig deep.MR: There's plenty of people who will do that work and do it well. So I mean, they can't find somebody you can recommend them. AG: I've got friends I can recommend, actually.MR: I would think so, yeah.AG: I do pass it on. That's if I can, anyway.MR: It's good to know your boundaries because then you can be really clear and you can really lean into the specific elements that you've chosen to work with, right? That's pretty cool. And obviously, like you said, that you, you're not a typical churchman, right? You're the vicar for the people who don't usually go see vicars. So this fits right into your personality, I would think.AG: Yeah. I lean into it. That and the autistic side I really lean into on purpose. And it's quite amazing how many people then talk to you about that kind of stuff and makes them realize that we've got a human face. Well, supposedly, anyway. MR: It's funny. Your story of discovering graphic recording is not so different from my discovery of graphic recording. I started exploring Sketchnoting. I had no clue, just like you, that this whole community and "industry" existed. And this was, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I just stumbled onto it and realized, you know, the stuff I was discovering myself and building Sketchnoting totally matched the same principles that they were doing. They simply did it large scale, in person. You know, maybe they were trying to be more neutral. A lot of graphic recorders just try to be interpreters, right? They don't leave an opinion. So yeah, that was a little bit different, but I mean, at the core of it, it was really similar. And then, I don't know, was it 15 years ago? I was invited to come to the IFVP in Pittsburgh since I was nearby and spoke to that group and then became really good friends with lots of graphic recorders and see the relationship. But it's kind of amazing that you can have these ideas and sort of practice them and only later stumble into like, "Wow, there's like this community."AG: Yeah. People pay for it. What?MR: Yeah. It's pretty exciting.AG: People pay for that. Okay, fine. MR: I could do that.AG: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I don't even need to think and I get paid for it. I'm great. You know, it's awesome. It's awesome. MR: So well, you know—AG: I just—MR: Go ahead. AG: Yeah. no, I was gonna say, I mean, I mentioned earlier, didn't I? That I mean it's a big, it's a big thing. Thing for me is the whole thing about, 'cause I remember when you say, say that, so my brain really bounces between one thing and another. I think that's what really helps me to be able to do what I do. And with you saying about IFVP, I remember, there's not that much on YouTube, you have to really dig for it. But I found one of the recordings of one from about, I think about 2017 or something, and I think it was Kelvy Bird, was saying "No, we are artists. Stop saying you are an artists. "And I was trying to think about why is it that so many people, you know, sketch notes as well, who come across and say, oh, it's not you, we're not artists. You're, and, and I think you've got your little certificate, haven't you, saying it's okay to suck at art. MR: Yeah, I think it's great. AG: And I think one of the problems is that I mean, you might disagree, happy for that. The problem is that people look and say art is realism. So what they do is because they can't draw something realistically. They say, "I can't draw, so I'm rubbish and I'm not even gonna try it again." Whereas I'm trying to teach people and say, well, actually no, do you know when you do your letters in a particular way, that's as you are? If you haven't noticed, you can go and buy prints of letters and put it on a wall.So I'm coming from a very much an artist's point of view, and I'm saying, look what art does—I discovered this in the Tate Gallery. Do you know the Tate Gallery? You're familiar with that? So it's basically, it's all modern art and stuff and made-up stuff. I say, made up. Yes, it's true. And here was a huge canvas. I'm saying huge. I mean, we are talking feet upon, feet upon feet by feet upon feet upon feet upon feet of gray canvas in this white room.And he'd walk in, it was battleship gray. And it was like, what's the point of that? You know, why, why. So abstract art, always ask why, seeing what it does to you. So abstract art is about what's it do to you. Abstractionism is slightly different, but what's it do to you? And people are going, "No, that's a bit rubbish. That isn't it? How can that be in any gallery?"But if you went up and you read the little plaque, the little tiny plaque next to this huge canvas, it says, "This is not saying that this is art. It is saying what does art do to the room. What does art do to the room?" So in other words, the gray canvas, it says this gray canvas wasn't here, it just be a white room. Now the gray canvas is here. What's it do to the rest of the room? Ignore the canvas.And you had all sorts of things. You've got people having conversations, deciding what it was, and you start to realize that the aesthetic of art is that it makes people talk. It makes you think different. It has an impact. In fact, I'm always saying that art is not meant to be hidden away in a secret gallery. Art is meant to be responded to. When I do a piece of art, I say, "What do you think?" And that person says, "Well, I think this." And I go, "Oh, why do you think that?" Because it's the conversation it initiates, which is the important bit.And I think that that's the point that when we do our graphic recordings when we do our big physical thingies, you are creating conversation. You are not trying to just sort of like having—you're creating conversation. So whether that's just in letters or images, it doesn't matter. And then you get to the point of saying, well, actually, what is art? So art is a triangle, and you've got a symbol. You've got realistic, and you've got abstract. And art falls somewhere in that little triangle somewhere.So if you look at my style, which is like I said, New Yorker style, we're looking more about the symbol. Somewhere in the symbol artistic kind of element. And the more—sorry, symbol and realistic. And the more realistic you do something, the more people will notice problems with your picture. They'll notice it's all squiffy, whatever. But the more fun you make it, the more cartoony.I mean, I can draw one hand bigger than another to make a point. Make a point 'cause the hand's bigger. And that's great. 'cause People say, "Oh, it's just a style, isn't it?" And they won't try and say it's wrong. So what I'm trying to say here is that you can actually draw, but just have fun with it. Don't try and worrying that away. I haven't drawn a car that looks quite like a car. Instead you you can draw a car and say, well, if it's got these elements on it, people recognize it as a car. It's a bit like a symbolic emoji of a smiley face. It's really just a circle, two dots and a curve, and that's it. But you arrange them and compose them into the right way., it's now a smiley face.And I think that so many people in the graphic recording and sketchnoting and visual thinking world have got it into their heads that they can't draw. And so put up these barriers saying, "I can't draw, therefore I don't do art." And not realize that actually what they need to do is say, "Actually, maybe I create art in a different way, and I could explore it."And if they explore it and say, well, I can do art, then it might open the floodgates for them to be able to explore new spaces to go into and relax a bit. So yeah, it's one of the things I do. I coach people and train people in art as well. So, if anybody wants to know, I'll help them.MR: That discussion came up in Laiden with my friend Ben Crothers, who's from Australia. And he was challenging, like, you know, 10 years ago when I wrote my book, my big mantra was Ideas, not art. It was positioned as so many people had baggage around art that would stop them from doing anything whatsoever. And the solution that I had at that time was, you know, let's focus on the ideas. Don't worry about the art. That was the message I was saying.Like, you can put a few elements together and you're producing communication. And then the problem is over time, if you hold onto that, you feel like, well then I'm not an artist. Exactly what you're talking about. So we discussed that maybe the phrase could change to something more like ideas than art. So in other words, you begin building the ideas and then eventually you realize you're kind of moving into an art space where it is art and we can learn from artists to improve and level up and keep growing. So that was something we discussed right on that same track.AG: Yeah. And it's about just practice, keep practicing and trying ideas out. And also, I mean, one of the things which I'm interested with sharing the work which I've been developing with other graphic recorders is they give you feedback and initially find that what they're feeding back is their perspective on what it should be. One of the things about training in theology and I've done for literally decades is reflection and understanding. Reflecting, refine, reflect, refine, reflect, refine.So I've developed now a filter process and reflection process so that I can look at a piece of work I've done and decide what needs to change. And then when you are working on something, don't try and change everything all at once and learn to do everything all at once, but instead, look and say, "Well, do you know what? I'm gonna learn to do this one bit better in my style. And then when I've learned to do that bit, I'm gonna learn to change this bit and do that over and over in the next thing."So you're doing iteration and you iterate fast, but you just do lots of them, but then you are changing. If you want to draw cartoon characters, you know, learn to draw eyes, learn to draw ahead, what's your style of drawing head learn to draw the three-quarter view. You know, really most of the time you're only face on side on and three quarter. That's all you need to do.Then you can do this like the clever tilting of the head and everything else. But just do those three, first of all, learn how to do it. Draw a ball, learn to draw a ball, and then do the half circley things on them. You know, it's not rocket science. It's kind of fairly simple, really.MR: Take it a bit at a time. It seems like it is a good way to approach it and not leaving it to be overwhelmed pretty easily with the totality of what you could do. So focusing on small bits and keep on working. And then eventually it will all come together as a unit.AR: Well, if people see my work, they get gobsmacked. They go, "Oh, you are so fast and you are so good. I can't draw anything." It's like, Yeah, that's 'cause I've developed slowly and because I'm an illustrator as well. One of the things that if you look at an athlete and they do drills, they slow it down and they go through the process. So if you watch an athlete practicing their hard link, they kinda like do this weird goose step kind of thing as they're just programming their muscles to do it.And I think that actually if anybody wants to learn to draw really fast, go really slow and learn what it looks like really slow. Go slow, learn to construct, and then do some little sprint exercises of how quickly can you do it, and then go back and do it again. Go slow and then sprint.MR: It's kind of a slow building process. That's really good advice.AR: Yeah.MR: We're almost stepping into tips, but we want to talk about tools before we get to the tips.AR: Okay. I go all over the place.MR: You mentioned Neuland, you mentioned the graphic wall.AR: Yeah.MR: Do you wanna get into like that kind of stuff? And do you do personal small scale stuff and sketchbooks with pens? Are there any tools that you, especially like?AR: Well, I mean I will grab any bit of ground as they're called, any bit of paper or whatever. Some days I'll use pencils. Some days I'll use a ballpoint pen. It just depends what mood I'm in, you know. I like a good bit of color. I mean, you find a lot of graphic recorders they will use one, maybe two shade colors 'cause they can't flick fast. But as I've done my work and my family have looked and said, "No, we like full color best,"So I have to draw full color. And I thought how I'm gonna draw quick enough. And then last week when I was working with a neuroscientist and he was linking together the ideas I was saying to be able to feed back to the group as we were working with these 200 people. He said, "I wonder what to do while you are drawing." I said, "I know you can be my colorist".MR: There you go.AR: So I drew, and then he would color for me. So, this I'm gonna have going forward. I'm gonna have somebody coloring for me 'cause it's a heck a lot easier. And I'll just put a little bit in and say, "What color do you want?" "I want that in pink". "Really? Yeah. Let's go pink." So I kinda like put really bright colors in. So I try to reflect the brand, but then I'll throw in other colors at the same time. So I work in that color spectrum 'cause I'm an artist and I love color.MR: So, well, if you look at comics, I mean, you have the inker, you have the penciler, the inker, and the colorist. They are separate in that sense.AR: That's where I'm coming from. We were doing tools, weren't we? Ignore the digital, I hate digital apart from when I'm doing the book. So we won't even talk about them. Procreate, you all right. You know. Oh, have you seen Procreate Dreams? That's exciting.MR: Yeah. That's the newest one, yeah.AR: Yeah. But no, I work in pure paper, but there's other tools as well, which I've just got. So those people who end up breaking their backs, carrying those big boards and the stands and two rolls of paper in your ski boot or your document tube or whatever. It must weigh about 10 kilos. I've just bought myself a camera bag a big 100 quid for all my marker pens. All right. So there's a top tip. You save money on big boxes and things. A camera bag is brilliant for all those marker pens and all the s spare inks and everything else.But put all those is I've just bought for myself something called a Rock N Roller, which I think have built for gigging musicians. You get all types of them, but basically this thing drops down to about a half meter, but it'll stretch up to about a meter and a half. It's got stands on it and you can put a bag on it, a big bag with ends on it. It's like this giant Ikea trolley thing and it'll take up to 500 pounds of weight.MR: Wow.AG: So I can put all this in my car, I can put the little Stanley my car and put everything else into it and then wheel it all in in one go. Genius. I'm a bit proud of that. So tools, get yourself a trolley and stop wrecking your back in 'cause five boards is about 30 kilo. It hurts.MR: Yeah. And you're gonna need your back to be performing.AR: Oh yeah. You wreck your shoulder. So camera back and a Rock N Roller trolley to push everything in.MR: And Neuland markers. It sounds like you're doing more with that. Yeah, the best.AG: Yeah. Neuland markers and the biggest paper you can find and the graphic wall and all the rest of it.MR: Cool. Well, let's shift then to tips. I think we've already got one, don't wreck your back is probably tip number zero.AG: Yeah, I would. Very important.MR: So I request three tips from people. And I frame it as someone's listening who maybe they're in a rut, maybe they just need a little encouragement. What would be three things you would tell that person to help them move forward?AG: Okay, three. Right.MR: It's not limited to three. I mean, you can go beyond three.AG: Oh, might be going a few hundred, actually. I've go to a thousand sets. Gain contact with me, I've got some training. I hardly can't charge anything at all. Actually, I mean, at some point I was trying to come up with it with it already, but I've not managed to get round to it, but I'm gonna be putting a course together next year.It's gonna be subscription-based 'cause the cost of entry into this world of graphic recording is huge. It's really expensive. And so, I wanted people to have a start of a 10, if they liked it, and then they can go and buy a bigger course or whatever. So that's the intro to the tips. But I would say practice, the biggest thing of all is practice. So practice going slow, practice going fast.But one of the best things you could do, I think is find the long-form videos on YouTube. There's plenty of them. I would hate to say this, but dump Ted Talks, they're great, but they're so fast. You just feel depressed because you can't keep up with them.MR: Can keep up, not when you're starting.AG: Yeah, I've tried and it's like you know and some of them aren't all that good. So instead, what I suggest is go and find the long-form videos especially those based around business because then you are learning at the same time. Okay, so that's the first thing. Graphic record, the business ones. Okay.Second tip, and I dunno if this works in Android, but it certainly works on iPhone. When you've done your practice of your business tip, right. Take a photograph of it. I mean we always just take photographs of all the work because iPhone, if you then type into search, it will search for the words that are actually on your graphic recording. Did you know that? Do you use that or not?MR: No, I haven't used that.AG: Which is brilliant because then it means, especially if you remember to write on the YouTube name of where you found it when you want to reference back to find the information—there are loads of things on there as well like book summaries and things. When you want to reference it, you can say, oh, I remembered that it was the name of this guy who did it. So you type it into your iPhone and then it'll bring up the graphic recording.MR: That's pretty cool.AG: What's more, if you say you want, if you wanted a subject on sort of like abilities. So you wanted to find out, well what is it about—lots of people I've heard recently have talked about the word ability and I've now written it a few times, right? So you type the word ability in and it brings up all the graphic recordings you've done on ability and now you can link the ideas together. So that's really useful.And related to that is if you're gonna become a professional graphic recorder, it's stuck with me the other day. So this is new thinking. I like to give people new thinking. We are the best networkers in the world. And there's massive value in putting people who can network. But because we are going in to deal with different companies and people, we can network people together. So that's another tip.And the final one I think we would say, which is which is very useful it's a technique which is called something about, and I got this from the coaching when we were being coached. So the way that it went was that is that you were put into partnership with somebody and you talked to them and you were told, right, "Tell them everything about what recently happened." So you tell 'em the story.And then the other person has to tell you back everything they can remember from what you said. And you go, "No, you didn't remember everything. There's bits you missed." They said, well do it again, another story, but this time the other person's gonna summarize it into two or three sentences. And so, this time you go, oh actually you got it quite right there, but you missed this bit of this bit.I said, right, you're gonna do it one more time with another partner. And this time you're gonna go say something about and give them one word. Okay? So you do that so you're listening and you finally realize you can't remember everything. So all that stress I try to remember you can't do. And so you just relax and let the whole ideas just merge. And then you get the kinda like this one idea that seems to almost evolve in your head. And then you go, "Is this something about this?" And you say one word and the other person goes, "Yes, that's exactly it."And it's the weirdest feeling. When you experience this, you go, "I just felt heard." Now if you take that and apply that to graphic recording and visual note taking and sketch noting, you suddenly realize that you can use so few words, and the fewer words you use the better, which is brilliant. What I tend to do in my process is—I've seen people write on post-it notes and stick them up and stuff, and I couldn't do that.If you get a 2B pencil, so this is the people working on graphic recording on big walls, so I have a top tip for them here. You can actually write on the wall with a pencil and from a distance of about five, six foot away, no one can see the writing, they can't see it. You write quite big, no one can see it. So you don't even need to rub it off at the end. So you write it in pencil as you're going along.So when people start, they're often, like I'm doing today, waffle mode. They're telling stories, this is my history, it's got nothing to do with the thing they're gonna talk about. And you don't wanna capture that so you just start write it and just write out what they're saying long form if you want, just so you can remember the bits they've said. 'cause something might be relevant in the future.And then suddenly they'll say something and they'll say it slightly slower and slightly louder and you'll go, "Ah, that's important." And then you look back at the notes and now you can take everything they've said and turn it into an image and then you're off 'cause now you're drawing at the same time as listening. So you can do that and bring all those things together. I think creates a rather exciting space.MR: Well that's a great tip.AG: I do apologize. That was rather a lot.MR: I think you ended up with like five or six, which is great.AG: Yeah, I know. We didn't limit it, so.MR: I told you, you could go beyond three. So you know, you went however that you want.AG: Oh, I could waffle forever, I'm afraid.MR: Well Andy, that's been so good to have you. How would we find you? What's the best place to find you? Do you have a website? Are you on certain social media, LinkedIn?AG: Yeah, you can find me on virtually everywhere. Well, I'll say everywhere. You can find me on Instagram, you can find me on LinkedIn, and even my website and it's onegraydot. So spell the American way. So I'm gonna spell it out for you 'cause nobody gets this right for some reason I came up with it years ago. So it's O-N-E-G-R-A-Y-D-O-T, all one word, not separated.And it's all onegraydot.com, LinkedIn onegraydot, and so it goes on. And it's gray. So what I do is I start off with a big blank wall and I put one gray.in the center of it and I say it's no longer blank, so you can't spoil it, now it's got one gray.in it. And I say, what do we do? We connect the gray dots, just one gray dot at a time. So all links in into salesmanship.MR: Yeah. That's pretty cool. And you know, while you were talking, I just for fun, I did a little search and brought up your Facebook page and at the top you've got an image up there. And what it reminds me of, like you said, New Yorker, for me, it reminds me of Red Bull. You know, the Red Bull gives you wings, cartoons. Have you seen these? It's exactly like that.AG: It's all editorial cartooning you say.MR: Yeah, exactly.AG: So it's all sort like of the same kind of thing really fast. So yeah, best place to find me for sort of like this kind of stuff is probably on LinkedIn and Instagram.MR: Okay. Well, of course, we always good show notes.AG: Facebook is Rev, Andy Gray, if you really wanna know. So Facebook's Rev, Andy Gray with an A.MR: Gotcha. And we'll of course put show notes, links to everything that can find and that we can bother Andy to send to us and put into the list. So if you're curious to see more, you can click there and check it out. Well, thank you, Andy. It's so good to have you on the show. Thanks for the influence you're having in the world and with people who maybe don't expect it and need it. Thank you so much for all that work you're doing. I really appreciate it. And thank you for being on the show and sharing your story. It's been great to have you.AG: Well, thank you.MR: And for everybody who's listening or watching, this is another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, until next time.