Sketchnote Army Podcast

In this episode, Dr. Bryan Vartabedian shares how he is creating a child-centered, family-friendly healthcare experience using visuals, to achieve better healthcare outcomes and a positive experience for all involved. Dr. Vartabedian is Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children's Hospital Austin, he is also a full-time faculty member at Baylor College of Medicinea and is professor of the practice at Rice University as cofounder of the Medical Futures Lab.Dr. Vartabedian is the author of Looking Out for Number Two – A Slightly Irreverent Guide to Poo, Gas and Other Things That Come Out of Your Baby (HarperWave, 2017) and Colic Solved – The Essential Guide to Infant Reflux and the Care of Your Screaming, Difficult-to-Soothe Baby (Ballantine/Random House, 2007).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’ infinite canvas lets you sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea, or keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most.The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Dr. VartabedianOrigin StoryDr. Vartabedian's current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find Dr. VartabedianOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.Dr. Vartabedian on LinkedInDr. Vartabedian on X33 Charts NewsletterRob Dimeo’s Scientific Sketchnoting33 Charts SketchnotesThe Sketchnote WorkbookToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. EXPO Low-Odor MarkersHeavy grade notebookWide nib fountain pensSigno Uniball 1.0mm gel penTipsBe Intentional.Look for a role model.Keep it simple, keep it clean.CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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 here, and I'm here with my friend Dr. Bryan Vartabedian. Dr. Vartabedian, it's so good to have you on the show.Bryan Vartabedian: It's great to be here. I think we've been planning this for a number of years, and it never really happened, right?MR: Yes. Yeah, well, we're both pretty busy people.BV: Right.MR: You being a physician and leadership certainly, you know, demands your time for very important things. Probably more important than Sketchnote podcasts many times. But, you know, sooner or later we figured we'd catch you, and it's worked out. So I'm really happy to have you here.BV: Great to be here.MR: So, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.BV: By training. I'm a pediatric gastroenterologist. Spent most of my career as a full-time clinician. Over the past couple of years, I've gotten into medical leadership and I helped Texas Children's here in Houston build a couple of their community hospitals, and they recruited me to open our new Austin flagship hospital in Northwest Austin. So I'm merging into medical leadership and it's been kind of fun, a little different.MR: Cool. And I know that Austin is growing leaps and bounds, so I imagine the demand in Austin for those services has got to be pretty significant, I would imagine.BV: Yeah.MR: That's good.BV: Yeah, big tech explosion going on there. And so, a lot of demand for pediatric services and so we're also offering women's services there too. So high risk kinds of women's services.MR: wow.BV: It's a beautiful hospital up in Cedar Park in Northwest Austin, if anyone listening wants to know.MR: I don't know that I've been in that region, but I've been to some other regions around Austin so I'll have to look on a map when we're all done. So you've been doing that. I'm really curious now, like — so we talked a little bit, I warned you that we're gonna do, they call it the superhero origin story. Like, how did you get to the place where you are. We know where you're now, but how did you get here?And more importantly, for this audience, how did visual thinking using your whiteboard to explain very complex topics to patients is what I remember we talked about in my book 10 years ago. How did you end up integrating that into your practice? 'Cause it doesn't seem like that's something — I mean, you know, the big joke is "Doctor's handwriting are impossible to read," and it sounds like your handwriting is quite legible. So how did you end up in that place? I'd love to hear that story and—BV: Mike, it's a good question because I think I have been using large whiteboards in my exam rooms, I guess now for over 20 years. And it started with these little whiteboards, these little tiny whiteboards that they used to have in exam rooms that would sort of tell the nurses — you've seen these in like hospital rooms?MR: Yeah, yeah.BV: The nurse's name, like who the assistant is and what time the lunch trays are coming in or whatever. And so I used to try to — I found myself sort of sketching pictures on these little tiny boards. And it was sort of unsatisfying 'cause I was so constrained. And maybe it was around Y2K, I had the manager invest in some larger boards and larger dry erase boards, which really expanded my ability to kind of develop a kind of an intentional use of graphics in the exam room with families.And I just sort of fell into it. And the real tipping point, you know, around the time smartphones were kind of new, and I noticed mothers would hold their phones up and take pictures of what I had drawn. And it was kind of at that moment, and the remarks that I got from families about how images, and even just bullet lists and arrows and things were so instrumental in helping them understand what was going on with their child. As you can understand, you know, physiology — you know, anatomy can be tricky to describe. A gallstone in a gallbladder.MR: Yeah.BV: Or a poop back up in the colon. When you make a picture of that, it really, really is a lot easier for someone to understand. Even beyond pictures, you know, even just bullet lists, a bullet list with arrows or two bullet lists with an arrow going between the two. Something as simple as that for a young mother with an eight-week-old child who's exhausted, if you try to explain some of this stuff without any supporting media to help them even remember what the five things in the list are, it's impossible. So I don't even know how people practice medicine without this kind of visual.MR: I think back to like when I've had x-rays done, like you could show me the x-ray and you could explain to me how it works, but it still doesn't make sense to me because I'm not practiced in understanding how to interpret that. So you almost really need, like, what you're talking about. And, you know, I'm looking at the Sketchnote Workbook sample that we have here. You're talking about a gastroparesis likely—BV: Gastroparesis, yeah.MR: — you were sort of drawing this symbol, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes so you can see what I'm talking about. You almost need — so there's like the situation and there's a conceptual component to it where you're explaining the concept of what's happening, why it's happening, and how we're going to address it in this simple way. Because even showing pictures like X-rays are not gonna be helpful to, again, a mother who's tired and has this eight-week-old who's crying because they hurt, you know?BV: Yeah, absolutely. And you know what's so interesting is that we — are you in Wisconsin?MR: Yes. Yeah. You remembered. Yeah.BV: Yeah. So we use the biggest EHR program I think in the world called Epic, Colorado, Wisconsin.MR: Yeah.BV: Big Wisconsin company. And, you know, I think our hospital paid 15 million to implement it. And it has some amazing abilities, but something very, very interesting, and it's funny, has happened, I'll go through a 30-minute consult with a child who's not growing or whatever, and I'll make a note, make my impression docs. Have a thing called the impression, which is what we think is going on. And that's often we refer to when we go back in the notes, what was I thinking back then?But I've had parents, I've gone through the chart. You know, a patient comes back two months later, I look at my note and my note maybe isn't that great? Then the mom pulls out her phone and shows me the sketch note that I did on the board. And within seven seconds I can see like everything that we discussed without even, — you know, more than seven seconds, I can just tell. So it's so interesting that a visual can be a better way to document kind of what I was thinking, what I was doing even more than, you know, a hundred million dollars software package.MR: Yeah. I've had this theory that it's something to do with the mapping or the use of space and the mapping ability of a visual. So you're not only working with words, but you're always putting them in context to each other. So there's more implied and even explicit relationships that you can draw but because it's using the space where typing and text gets crunched into this text, even a list, right. Like it's got its limitations.So it'd be interesting to see, you know, does Epic allow you to upload your pictures? That might be an interesting way to solve that problem, right? Well, while the mother is taking a picture, you are too, right?BV: So it does, it absolutely does. And I've yet to pull the trigger on that. There is a very interesting thing that's come up, which is, what about liability? When I write on a whiteboard, does that become part of subject to what's called legal discovery. Let's say I made a mistake with a diagnosis, could a mama pull out my whiteboard picture and use that in a court of law?And probably, honestly, so it's probably the good if our hospital attorneys are listening, they're like, "You need to get those in the chart immediately." But I think it's always bothered me a little bit that I do these images and they're honestly very powerful, but I think they do probably carry — I haven't gotten in trouble yet, but I do think they can and should be part of the medical record.MR: Yeah.BV: You know, you were talking about, I don't know, giving context maybe to what we're discussing. One of the things that happens when I have these whiteboards and once I launch into a discussion with a family, these visuals become the center of the discussion, and it becomes really powerful with a family that doesn't speak English.If I have a migrant family that speaks Spanish, maybe not super educated, and, you know, I draw a simple picture of a stomach or a colon or a liver with red hash marks to mean inflammation, it's almost universal.And we gather around the board —I've even had patients participate in the sketch noting to sort of add things that are missing. And especially, it's really powerful with kids who are probably pre-teen and older who can really kind of add to it or correct what I've put up in terms of symptoms and that sort of thing. But the point being that it kind of becomes this center, and even when I have a translator, the translators know me and they go to the board and they're pointing. And so, it just all kind of works, you know.MR: There's some collaborative nature to that. I know in the work that I do, when we collaborate on boards together, it's much richer than if it's just me preaching to the other people. I invite people to come up to the board and it becomes much more valuable because then everybody's really adding to it and adding dimension, because you can't know or see everything, right? You can't feel what the patient's feeling. So you have to rely on their ability to describe to you, and maybe they don't even think about it until they start writing, and that might reveal something they couldn't verbalize, right?BV: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the past 10, 15 years we've been seeing this rise of participatory medicine where patients are more empowered with what — you start with the web and all that. It used to be the doctor was a priest and the priesthood and all that sort of thing. Now people are more —- there's more participatory.And there's also, there's a movement called shared decision-making in medicine where patients participate in deciding on the plan in a collaborative way. And when we put four or five options listed one through five on the right side of the board, which is where I always put them, we can negotiate that a little bit. And it just lends to weighing things when you can see them written down.MR: I would imagine too that the idea of a collaborative to whatever degree with the patient would also mean their buy-in to actually, so if there's a part that you do and then there's a part they have to do. Medications, physical therapy, I don't know, variety of things that they are responsible for, that if they feel like they've had a hand in making that choice, they're gonna be more likely to actually fulfill their part of it, which means a better outcome, right?BV: Yep. There's some evidence to support that, but I can just tell you I see that firsthand and yeah, for sure, once they're involved in it, they definitely are more invested for sure.MR: Yeah, I know I am. I can only speak for me, I guess, but that's pretty cool.BV: It's been a fun journey and we've had interest from — the docs of the Mayo Clinic have called me and it's like, "How do you do this?" And I think we even kicked around maybe a decade ago. I thought I should make like a white paper to teach doctors how to do this, and I never did it. But something that's sort of akin to sketch notes for clinicians, you know because I think I do have a methodical way that I do it, a way that I use the geography of the board to optimize the space and, you know, what do I use bullets for? Where do I put the plan? And so on and so forth.MR: Almost like a language.BV: Yeah, but I thought of formalizing it, which I haven't yet, but I probably should.MR: I have some potential inspiration. My friend and colleague, Rob Dimeo is a physicist. He started using it in his practice as a physicist and found it really valuable, even though he had to modify the way he did it. He wrote a paper that basically explains how he uses sketch notes in a scientific setting. It might be a really interesting reference to start from and see how he structured it, and then maybe produce something along the same lines could be interesting. So we'll put that in the show notes too, and I'll make sure you get that.BV: I don't just use visual thinking in the exam room, you know, in the spirit of Austin Kleon, who's sort of a cartoonist here in Austin, Texas, I keep a journal and I do a lot of my thinking and kind of visual thinking, not as beautiful as you do. But when I'm sorting through ideas, I use a lot of the sketch notes elements to sort of help me understand how I'm thinking about things from basic, you know, brainstorming to mind mapping to everything.MR: That's really great to hear that's used privately as well in your thinking.BV: It's maybe that's how I started doing it in the exam room too because this is kind of — and you said this just a moment ago. I don't know what I think until I write it down sometimes. I can't tell all of an idea, but it's like, until I put it into some sort of construct. There's also, you know, different media stimulate me to be creative in different ways. For example, I do a lot of writing and I type I use an app called Ulysses. It's kind of like writing—MR: Yeah, I use that too.BV: — app. But there are times when I'm stuck and if I take to a white sheet of paper with your sketch notes elements or just let myself go free things come out that would never come out on a keyboard.MR: Yeah. I use the same tool and I run into the same challenges when I do workshops. Sometimes I just need to take a notebook and go to the cafe and get coffee and dump on the page, and they're not beautiful, but I get so much information then what I do is I'll take that more mapped visualization, then I'll come back and then I can write again. It sort of opens up the, detail that I got stuck on when I'm trying to type. My typing fingers don't work as effectively as my visualization fingers, I guess.BV: I see.MR: If that makes sense. Yeah. How did you end up — so when I look at the work that you do, it seems like you got quite good handle on visualization. Were you trained in any way? Did you just naturally do this? Did you draw when you were a little kid? Where did these basic skills come from?BV: I did a lot of art when I was very young. So it's interesting you should say that. I never thought about it, but I did. And honestly, with what I do on the whiteboard, and I have other images too, the elements of what I do are pretty simple.MR: Yes.BV: And almost like what you outlined, it's got — and this is the reason why I think anyone can do this. Any doc can do this. And in a minute, I'll get into what some docs do and what they do wrong when they try to do this, but like writing, I think maybe in the book there's a picture of an esophagus and a stomach, and the esophagus is two lines going down. The greater curvature of the stomach is a big curve, and the lesser curvature is a little curve, and anyone can do that.Red hash marks are a inflammation universal sign. And a little round circle is an ulcer. And, you know, so I'm kind of a minimalist in terms of what I do on the whiteboard. I try to use basic elements. I try not to overdo it. I try to write it with the understanding that the mama's gonna take a picture of it, and I want it to be clean enough and legible enough so that when she goes home to dad over dinner, she can point and she can do the teaching.MR: Yeah.BV: One of the mistakes I've seen is some of my colleagues start getting very you know, hyper graphic and hyperkinetic and very, very busy, which can be kind of natural for some people, but the end result can kind of be hampered, I think, on some level. So I try to keep it intentionally on the clean, maybe in the way that you would do a sketch note at a meeting.MR: Right. Doing something clean and simple is actually harder than doing it messy because you don't have to really think, when I say this thing what is it conveying? Is it necessary? Those kind of questions you have to ask. I guess the other thing about leaving it open and clean is if you're doing this collaborative work, I'm looking at the sample here, you've got some stuff drawn in black, and then you've got a a movement shape in green. It looks like it's moving out of the stomach. And then you have Prevacid is one of the choices versus Bentyl.BV: Oh, yeah, yeah.MR: Indicate that Prevacid in that context that 15 milligrams is better, and you use a red marker to sort of circle that.BV: Right.MR: So you've got this language that it's really simple, but you're using this language to annotate. And if you pack that full of stuff, not gonna have any room to really do that annotation and still have it clean and understandable. You would think.BV: Yeah. And I try not to overdo the colors either. I tend to stick to two or three typically because it's the colors aren't that important but it can add an element that's helpful. It's funny, Mike, I sometimes tell my colleagues about this, and they say, "Oh, I do that, and I do it on the butcher paper, on the exam room table." You've seen the doc sketch with the pen on the paper, it's kind of a primitive kind of sketch noting, but my problem with that is it's not intentional. It's not intended to create a product at the end for the family. It tends to be, you know, scratched and scribbly. It's very hard to read.I think it's better than nothing maybe, but again, I think of the whiteboard, or even if you don't have a whiteboard, you can take a large oversized notebook and do that. If you're a doc listening, you can use a large oversize notebook with a Sharpie or a nice one-millimeter gel pen and get a good result.MR: Something that could be photographed. I could imagine some physicians might like to carry that book around with them from room to room. Maybe they don't wanna be leaving it on a board or erasing, that maybe carrying it's better for them. That could be—BV: I carried a whiteboard around with me in the hospital for a while, believe it or not. Yeah, it was sort of a trademark. But it became difficult because you'd forget it half the time, so.MR: Yeah. I know there's some startups that have happened. I don't know where they're at now, but there were these books, they were whiteboard inside, but you would fold it up and had a strap like a Moleskine notebook. You could get them in different sizes, like quite big. So you could literally carry it around, had a little clip for the marker so you could pop it open and do like a whiteboard drawing on the spot, which was kind of a cool idea.BV: You know, I've been tempted to use Procreate or something to sort of do these visuals on a pad, and then share digitally with a family. I just never quite get into that because I like the size and the grandeur of a large 5 ft whiteboard and the — you know what I'm saying?MR: Yeah. I think probably there's something about the whiteboard and the simple tools that makes it more approachable if you do wanna have family involvement. Drawing on your iPad or drawing on your notepad might feel like they're invading, whereas a whiteboard feels more neutral or something.BV: Yep.MR: And it's more common. One of the things I discovered when I started teaching Sketchnoting is I got fancy notebooks and pens and all this stuff, and I found out that actually, it was really intimidating for students to work with these really fancy tools. So now, when I do workshops, I just have them order a ream of paper and some flair pens and we're good. It sort of drops the level of the tool to the point that it almost is forgettable. You leave behind the paper or the pen and like, I'll just get another one. It's so simple. So I imagine that's the same thing.BV: And Kleon jokes — he's a cartoonist, again, I'll bring him up, but he's always joking, people email him and ask him what pen he uses, you know, as if, if they bought the same pen, they'd be just as talented. It drives him crazy because that's not the point, you know. Everyone's got their own favorite gel pen or the whatever.MR: You have to adapt it to your needs, right? That's part of the game. That's really interesting. So we sort of are stumbling into tools. So maybe we should just go there. Before we go there, I'd love to hear, is there something current that you're doing? Obviously, you sound like you've moved to a new location. Are you thinking about how you might use visualization in this new position? Or maybe start sharing these concepts with physicians there something new that you're doing that you might wanna talk about?BV: Yeah. Of course, the first order of business is to get whiteboards in our new clinics in Austin. So I've got that rolling. I have done workshops for my faculty locally here through the years and they love that. And as I suggested, people — they kind of do this on their own, but they've never done it with that intentionality of using it to create a product. So I do wanna pull it to Austin with me. I need to create some collateral material that teach people how to do this on the web kind of like you've done with workshops. And so, I would love to do that, but we're building this $700 million hospital and I gotta hire 200 doctors and—MR: Little time-constrained, Bryan.BV: Yeah, time-constrained. Time constrained. But my reputation precedes me 'cause everyone asks like, "You're gonna have the whiteboards?" And I'm like, "Oh yeah. Oh yeah."MR: Maybe we should cook up some kind of a weekend workshop where we'll record it with you and I'll be your host.BV: That'd be fun.MR: And you could get your whiteboard out and show us your practice and we'll record it, and then you can share it with whoever wants to learn your techniques. That'd be fun.BV: You know what's so interesting, Mike, is that since, you know, one of the great things about the internet, not like the internet's new or something, but there emerged this population of physician artists, and there are — I can, you know, point you to a bunch of illustrators and cartoonists who are, I mean, real professional cartoonists who are physicians who obviously with the emergence of the web, they became discoverable. Right before the web, no one, you know, how do you—MR: How would you know? Yeah.BV: How would you know there's a guide like sketching and so there's some real talent out there and what's amazing, we think of docs as sort of these narrow people, but there's a whole population of docs doing very interesting things with illustration and with graphics and cartoons. And so, it is kind of cool to sort of follow these people and see what they do.MR: And you are part of that community, in your own way, doing it in a different way.BV: Yeah, it is. What I do is very practical. You know, I'm doing it for a purpose and for an endpoint as a — well, I guess they are too, but you know, it's very different.MR: Their purpose is different, right?BV: Yes.MR: It might be more like medical illustration, which I'm aware of what it's explaining through medical illustration, which is a kind of a different, you know, practice, but you do need that skill to understand what something really is. If you misrepresent that, that could be pretty dangerous. Well, you know it sounds like your tools are pretty simple. I'm guessing it's whiteboards, and do you have specific markers that you prefer to use? Is there a certain color, certain brand, any of that kind of thing that you could share?BV: We use EXPO low odor. The odors of some of the whiteboards can be pretty strong, and for kids with reactive airway disease and other airway problems, it can be an issue. So we try to keep use the low odor. In my personal work, I have a thing for fountain pens, and so I use a nice heavy-grade notebook with wide nib pens. And so, I enjoy doing that. They require a little maintenance. Beyond that, I do a one-millimeter Signo Uniball, which is my favorite gel.MR: Nice broad tip. I like the one-millimeters as well. Kind of juicy. I say juicy, I like it juicy, so.BV: Yeah. Kind of slippery and all that sort of thing.MR: Yeah, exactly.BV: And I'll even practice on a notebook. Sometimes I'll be stuck in an exam room trying to figure out how do I express a concept of, you know, gallbladder motility maybe, and I'll just take out a sheet in my notebook and just start scribbling and come up with some real simple representations. And that's how I come up with what I use.MR: That's how you build sort of your library at the visual library that you use, right?BV: Yeah. I use probably 10 or 20 of the same kind of images suited to what's going on with the kid, and, you know, you mix and match them, but yeah.MR: That's a very simple tool set. And, you know, I neglected to ask this. So how do the kids react when they see this? Does that change your relationship with them? Do they feel more like they can enter the discussion when they see this kind of work?BV: Yeah, certainly for the teenagers, they definitely participate sort of on that intellectual level. What's so interesting is with a four-year-old who may not be engaged in the conversation that I'm having with the mama, when I go to the board, they light up and they see the colors. Oftentimes, I'll give them a marker and let them go to the lower part of the board and goof off and make — I've had kids try to copy what I'm doing, so it's kind of fun and cute. But yeah, they do.Kids are very drawn to pictures. And so, one of the funny things I'll do if I have a reluctant three-year-old, it works great with three-year-olds, who doesn't want to be examined, I'll have mom pull up their shirt and I'll say, "That whiteboard so that I can draw a picture of your belly button." So I look at their belly button like I'm studying it, and they'll make sort of a swirly figure on the board, and they just go nuts and they love it. And you get immediate buy-in. 'cause they see the thing and they look at their belly button and they say, "Oh, that's my belly button."MR: That could be a good trick for other visual thinkers who need to get the attention of little kids.BV: Right. So it's kind of fun. I may use it in a lot of different elements, so.MR: So this is a point in the podcast where we typically will do tips. I like to frame it that imagine someone's listening, they're visual thinking, whatever that means to them, and maybe they've hit a plateau or they just need a little inspiration. What would be three things you might encourage someone to do to help them break out of that rut or just to have a little inspiration?BV: Yeah. You know, I think that we talked about docs writing on butcher paper. You know, I might challenge people to sort of take it up a notch. Obviously, putting up a whiteboard as sort of a little bit of a challenge for a lot of people in clinics and it's wall space and that sort of thing. So again, a large pad can do the trick and maybe take that step to try to be more intentional with the educational material you're using. And you gotta kind of just jump in and try. So I would say, you know, be intentional. That maybe be one tip.The second tip might be look for a role model. I mean, you can look at the pictures that were in sketch notes, and I think I've got some online. I need an Instagram page, is what I need. But, you know, you can look up medical sketch notes, some of my blog posts I put on there. I just get a role model and see how people do it and what they do. And that's another thing to kind of get you unstuck. You wanted three, right?MR: If you got 'em three would be great.BV: So yeah, keep it simple. Keep it simple, keep it clean. I think that I'm a minimalist and I think families, again, you want to think about what you're creating for families when they go away and have fun with it. I mean, to me, I've had more fun in medicine doing this than anything else. You know, it's been a little bit of a side gig for me, and it's also great for families and makes it more enjoyable for me.MR: That's fun. And it serves the purpose and it communicates.BV: Yeah.MR: And in the best case scenarios, it integrates the patients with you which means better outcomes, which everybody's driving for, right?BV: Absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe that's the golden ring, is to try to connect whiteboards with disease outcomes, which if I had the right study design and the right person helping me coordinate it, I think we could do it. But so that might be a great project to aspire to.MR: That's the next thing after you get this Austin clinic all set up and rolling.BV: Yeah. And come down and visit. We'll give a tour.MR: Yeah. Maybe I can do a little teaching. I can teach some basics.BV: Yeah. We could do a live podcast from one of the exam rooms.MR: There we go. That sounds good. I will take you up on that. Austin's one of my favorite cities, so wouldn't be hard to convince me to come. Probably in the springtime though.BV: We'll get some barbecue. We'll get some barbecue.MR: Probably in the springtime.BV: Yeah.MR: Well, Bryan, this has been really great to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and sort of the way you approach things. Of course, we're gonna find a variety of things. I've got some things up here I can share in the show notes, but I would love to hear where are the places that you hang out most. Do you have social media that you hang out? It looks like 33 charts.com is your site and your blog. Are there any other places we should go to?BV: So I have a newsletter at 33 charts.substack.com, so it's the 33charts.substack.MR: Great.BV: I write a lot about — not a lot on visual thinking, which I should do, but a lot on technology and medicine and change and humans and how humans use technology. But you can find me there, 33 charts. I occasionally post there. People can reach out to me. You can find my contact, I think on my—MR: On that site. Yeah. On the site or on the substack shoe. Great. Well, thanks for making time.BV: Awesome. It's been great.MR: Yeah. This is a lot of fun.BV: It's great finally meeting you. Yeah.MR: Yeah, same here. And I wish you the best in your next venture, and for everyone listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army podcast in the Can. So, until next time, we'll talk to you soon.BV: Take care.

Hey, It’s Mike Rohde, and I’m here to announce season 14 of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, which is launching on Tuesday, October 31st, 2023.This season we’re featuring 9 amazing guests, including:Dr. Bryan VartabedianIngrid LillJono HeyElizabeth ChesneyLuke KelvingtonLena PehrsRev Andy GrayGary KopervasAshton Rodenheiser…and of course the fan favorite All The Tips episode for Season 14You are going to love every episode!Special thanks to our sponsor, Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.
Watch this space on Tuesday, October 31st for episode 1!SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching.Learn more: Concepts AppCreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerEsther Odoro: Shownotes and transcriptsSubscribe 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!

In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 13, we’ve gathered all the tips from 9 fantastic visual thinkers to inspire you!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 — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroKatrin WietekFilippo "Sketchy" BuzziniEric BakeyMaria Coryell-MartinJulia KnyupaTy HatchMawusi AmoakuEdmund GröplNatalie TaylorOutroLinksKatrin's WietekFilippo "Sketchy" BuzziniEric BakeyMaria Coryell-MartinJulia's KnyupaTy HatchMawusi AmoakuEdmund GröplNatalie TaylorKatrin’s TipsPick a project you are really excited about.Don't compare yourself to othersDon't overcomplicate things. Don't overcomplicate sketchnoting.Don't overvalue talent.Filippo’s TipsBarter your services.Ask your colleagues, connect, share, and give.Prepare your title ahead.Use Post-it notes.Eric’s TipsWhat problem are you trying to solve, who is it for, and what is the value of solving that problem?Where are you right now and where do you want to go?Be useful, resourceful, and know your five-mile famous world.Maria’s TipsUse a timer and set yourself a very small amount of time to do something.Give yourself the opportunity to play with color, what you see, and don't worry about composition.Paying attention to the world and just letting yourself start with notes just to start that attention.Trust the process.Practice not perfection.Julia’s TipsFake it till you make it.Work-life balance. Just continue learning every day, getting inspiration from everywhere, from your colleagues, traveling, and following people from different industries.Authenticity is the most important value nowadays so allow yourself to be yourself and be very kind o yourself.Ty’s TipsEverybody is creative in their own way, and that's okay.Enjoy what you do. You can like a range of different things, and that's okay.Set boundaries for the things that are really important to you, in your life that are not work-related. Set those boundaries, talk about them, and live your life in a way that reflects your priorities.Mawusi’s TipsContinue feeding your mind.Even if you go digital, keep drawing by hand.Don't overthink it. Just do it.Be open to trying something new.Listen to other sketchnoters.Share your work.Experience with other layouts, find out what works for you.Collaborate with your colleagues.Ask for feedback.Be intentional and tell someone your goal.Don't give up. Be patient.Edmund’s TipsBenefit from self-organized learning groups.Attend a LernOS sketchnoting circle.Zettelkasten with Obsidian is your second brain for sketchnoting.Take useful notes!Natalie’s TipsInvest and improve in what you love.Recognize what is your strength. Focus on your strength as you try and improve your weaknesses.Share your work.Write down your ideas.Get involved with the community.CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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!

In this episode, Natalie Taylor shares how she slowly built her sketchnoting skills and is now sharing her work through her channels.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 — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Natalie?Origin StoryNatalie's current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find NatalieOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.WebsiteInstagramSylvia DuckworthThe Sketchbook Handbook by Mike RohdeDoug Neill's YouTube channelToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Brush pens - Crawford & BlackSharpie gel pensStaedtler two-end marker pensCrawford and Black SketchbookiPad ProApple pencilProcreateEvernoteNoteshelfTipsInvest and improve in what you love.Recognize what is your strength. Focus on your strength as you try and improve your weaknesses.Share your work.Write down your ideas.Get involved with the community.CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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 my friend, Natalie Taylor. Natalie, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.Natalie Taylor: Thanks, Mike. It's so good to meet you, and thank you so much for inviting me on to the show.MR: It's good to have you and I love your accent. We mentioned this before we started recording. Your British accent into the north, which I picked up. It's fun to hear. I don't hear it all the time, so I will enjoy that as we have a discussion. Tell us about who you are and what you do.NT: I am Natalie. I'm from the Northeast, as you've mentioned, in a small seaside town. Full-time, professionally wise. I'm a market manager at a brilliant university here in the Northeast, and I'm an avid sketch noter on the side in my spare time.MR: That's great. We'll definitely dive into the sketchnoting details. That's what this is all about for all the crazy fans of sketchnoting who are willing to listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube video and learn. I think that's what it's all about. I'm really curious, so we know what you're doing now. Obviously, you've got some skills in marketing. How did you end up where you're at?Maybe particularly, from a visual thinking perspective, were there things that happened when you were a little girl that directed you, or maybe in your college years or, school years that guided you to where you are now? What would be those key moments if you were to give me an origin story, I like to call it? Like a superhero origin story for Natalie Taylor.NT: I love that. I love the Avengers origin story. That's what it always makes me think of.MR: Yes.NT: Looking back, it's interesting when I've listened to the podcast, I've listened to so many episodes and I notice a lot of people tend to describe that they've always been very artistic and very into doodling and drawing. For me, I used to think that I wasn't very creative, but looking back, I've always been quite creative, but more in the writing sense. I have always doodled, but I wouldn't sit and draw and do these kind of detailed drawings. It would be very basic, like smiley face, love, heart, and flowers.I would say it's quite a recent thing that I've got into sketchnoting. I say recently it's probably 9 or 10 years that I've been into presenting information in that way. Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I didn't have that artistic background if that makes sense.University, I studied media and communications, which at the time, it got given a bad rap a lot of the time as a degree that isn't sometimes as respected as some degrees. But looking back at that, that was very creative and a lot of the tools that I used in that degree are tools that I still use now. Things like Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, even setting up a website, creating a magazine.It was all creative and using graphics in that way. Like you mentioned, my professional background is in marketing and communications, so I've been in that for around 11 years-ish. It's a little long-winded way into how I got into sketchnoting but when I finished university, I wasn't quite sure what to do.It was just based around what jobs I was looking at the time and I thought, oh, PR and marketing obviously sounds quite fun and that's creative. It was creating leaflets and a lot of design work I suppose. That is kind of in the artistic realm. It was for the local fire brigades that was creating a lot of leaflets and newsletters for the local community about fire safety.That's how I got into marketing and having quite a creative role professionally. But it wasn't until my next role, 'cause that was a one-year temporary contract that I learned about sketch noting. I was working at a very, very small startup in the ed tech field.They had this brilliant software, which was the result of academic research all about collaborative learning. It started on this amazing technology. I dunno if you've ever seen the huge tabletops. When they were around, it was around 5,000 pounds, I think one of these tables.MR: I've seen the Microsoft Surface table, the original surface, years and years ago. Something like that.NT: Yeah, exactly. Similar to that. I think it worked on that and the Promethean giant tables. It was for this very specific hardware and then it adapted to be for iPads. But when I say small startup, it was me and the director, they were the directors, but not working full-time and then a computer programmer. I was doing everything marketing and communications and trying to raise the profile of this small startup company.It's part of that getting involved, building up the Twitter following, and finding things that people would find interesting. I don't think I've actually mentioned, but basically, the target audience was teachers and educators. It was when I started going on basically education Twitter that I came across Sylvia Duckworth.MR: Oh, yeah.NT: Who's sketch notes I absolutely love. That was my first experience of sketch notes and I would just look at them and be like, "Wow, these are absolutely brilliant. And they're just conveying the message she wants to converse so well that I thought I'd absolutely love to give this a go." I did find it really, really hard to get to grips with how to actually start.At the time I would just share her sketch notes with our Twitter followers 'cause they would find them really interesting. Then as part of that role, there was also the Bett show in London. This is a very international education technology conference, and we would go along to that. We didn't have our own stand but would be on hardware stalls and demonstrate in how the hardware could be used with our software.MR: Got it.NT: Then there was just snippets of time I had to go and watch some of the keynote speakers so I remember trying to take in—Sylvia had put some advice out on how to do sketch notes, but I had at the time a little iPad mini and I didn't have a stylus. I remember just trying to do sketch notes just with my finger on the iPad Mini which was really hard.MR: Yeah. Frustrating.NT: Yes.MR: I've tried that. I can relate.NT: I bet you, yeah. It's so tricky. Sylvia shared guidance on tools and things. I clicked on the links and it was this stylus that wasn't available in the UK and I just couldn't find an alternative so I tried doing them with my finger. Then I think I just become a little bit disillusioned with it 'cause I just thought mine are never gonna be anything that I could present to anyone or that people would find interesting.As time went on, I just practiced in my own time. Then I went to Japan on holiday, and they're obviously known for stationery and technology so I got a stylist there. I just played around with it on the flight home on Procreate. I'm still, to this day, not sure why I didn't ever think of trying analog and just getting paper and pens. I think maybe I did try, but just with felt tips and biros, and then I just was a bit like, "Oh, these aren't very visually appealing."MR: Just didn't fit, right?NT: Yeah, exactly. Gradually, I just built up and just practiced. With this stylus, I did start doing some—It would take me hours 'cause I would do a lot of tweaks afterwards and start tweaking around. I suggested to my manager, but again, 'cause we were such a small business, I had to have a lot of different hats on, so I couldn't just explore sketch noting, but I said, you know, these are really kind of intriguing teachers. So, occasionally I would start one and then do a lot of it in my own time, but I started doing almost as a marketing technique.Essentially, what the software was, was like card sorting activities. You might have one on a particular moment in history and then students would have to work with them and match them up and group them together. It was all about how it demonstrated their thinking and how they'd come to a conclusion. I would just do things like 17 reasons to create your own card sort or you know, the top 10 things about collaborative learning.I'd develop the confidence to write using the stylus and it looked quite nice, but still the drawing was just not something that I was very competent in. I would sometimes get free icon libraries and just put them in instead of actually drawing them myself.They were really successful actually at getting the message across as to what the software was, and Sylvia's work in sketch note and hers was still something I aspired towards, but I became more confident to share them on our channels.MR: It's interesting that you had, I guess an inspiration, Sylvia, right? Doing this work, so you knew, it's nice when you see that. Even if you feel like I can't quite achieve it, I have a focusing point and I'm gonna go for that. You're trying all these techniques, you're buying an iPad, you're trying to use your finger, you're trying analog and it doesn't fit, and then you find a stylus in Japan. You keep on moving.There was something about you that's pretty dedicated. You were gonna get there somehow. You didn't know how you're gonna get there and you kept on fighting through it even though a lot of people might have given up and it seems like you didn't. Why do you think that was that you didn't give up? That's really fascinating to me.NT: When you've said it like that, I suppose I was quite determined. The main reason is that I just enjoyed it so much. Like I said, I couldn't dedicate much time in the professional day to it, even though there were marketing tools, but I might do the baseline in maybe an hour, and then that weekend I would spend a few hours of my own time doing it purely because I just really enjoyed it.Sylvia's sketch notes, a lot of them were based towards educators, but a lot of them were quite general. Some of them she did were around mental health, which is something else that I'm really passionate about. That mental health sketch notes are probably one of the biggest things I do now since I'm not in that role anymore.The sketch notes that I do have completely changed. That's how I first started learning them. I think the reason why I stuck with it is because I saw how impactful Sylvia's were on me. I remember printing off a couple before and keeping them up. She did one on the iceberg effect, things that you see on the surface versus what's actually going on underneath, and I just found them really inspirational.MR: I'm sort of putting pieces together. On the one hand, you enjoyed it, so I there's one component. I find, like when you have multiple components that you're more likely to stay driven. You had the enjoyment part of it. You had enough success that you thought maybe I could do some portion of it. You talked about you like the writing, but then you would use icons so that is part of it too.But then on top of it, you could see the effectiveness of the sketch notes she did from a marketing perspective. You know what works in marketing, it's obviously impacting you. You're starting to see it probably in other places. Like this is an opportunity and I can see how it could work, but there was still a gap of getting to where you could do them to communicate and that just took time, right?NT: Exactly. Exactly.MR: That's interesting.NT: I think it must have been around two years ago that I came across your book, Sketching Army, and that completely revolutionized the whole thing again.MR: Oh, wow.NT: I just came across this whole community that I didn't know existed. I knew Sylvia had a sketch noting book, but it was specifically for educators. I'd been beavering a way of doing these things in my own time, but without much guidance or training. I think I did find Doug Neill's YouTube channel.MR: He's Great. Yeah, Doug is great.NT: Yeah, absolutely brilliant. I did a lot of his tools. I remember there was simple tips on how to practice so he had, I think I call it the dictionary game. Basically, you get a dictionary, open it to a random page and sketch note a word.MR: That's a good one.NT: Yeah. That really helped just gradually dipping my toes in. It's only been the last couple of years that I've actually shared them on my own channel and done them on things that I'm directly passionate about.MR: Cool. It's been a progression, right? You've been slowly building up your skills and now you're at the point where you are doing your own sketch notes and you're sharing them on your channel, and you've built those skills up through practice.That reminds me to say to people who are new to this, they'll come to me when I do little workshops and say, "How can I do this?" Like, "Well, it's not easy, but it's still fun. You can have success to a certain degree, but to get better at it, you're gonna have to practice. I don't know how to tell you that there's a substitute, there's no magic pill you can take. There's no, can't jump in a time machine. You just have to do it."What I'd identify in your story is this idea of overlapping. I keep coming across this when I can do one thing that overlaps with something else that I like that's more successful. If I can layer in a third thing, the success rate goes up, the more I can integrate several parts of my life or my interests.If you're a gardener, let's say, if you're passionate about gardening, well, planning your garden like as a sketch note might be really fun on multiple levels so you're more likely to do it and really get into it and maybe build a technique that you could then maybe you could actually teach other people how you approach that, right?NT: Yeah.MR: That's pretty cool, and I see that in your story. That's really fun and it's really satisfying for me to hear someone who's dedicated and committed to following the passion and multiple passions to arrive where you are, which is really cool.NT: Thank you. I do absolutely love sketch noting. I think that's the main thing is that I just really enjoy it and I would see some sketch notes and think—when I discovered the community on Instagram and looked at your sketch notes and sketch notes in the book, it was a case of, "Wow, these are absolutely fantastic. I might not be there now, but I can keep practicing the exercises in your book and Doug's channel."I've got another book that's just purely doodling different objects. When I had to self- isolate with COVID over last new year, I think it was, I spent hours just doodling and practicing.MR: Well, that's good. You probably accelerated your skills there. Like taking a bad situation and making it into something worthwhile, right?NT: Yeah.MR: I got COVID, and all I got was better at drawing, or whatever.NT: Yeah. It's a nice positive spin on something not good.MR: Yeah, exactly. You make the best out of what you've got.NT: Yeah.MR: This is really fascinating. I love hearing the origin story, my favorite part of the podcast because I think it's interesting for me to hear it, but I can imagine there's people listening, I don't even know who they are, who feel like, "Oh, you know, I'm a marketing manager, I can't sketch note, but Natalie's a marketing manager and she's sketch notes and that's her story. She really had to work at it, and it took a long time. Well, I could do that."You can relate to people because there's such a variety. We try to find such a variety of people that hopefully it inspires anybody who listens that they can do it. It takes work like anything worthwhile, it's gonna take work. You said you're a writer, like the only way you get better at writing, is to write. There's no substitute, and reading, of course. Reading to get inspired by like, "Wow, look how they turned that phrase or the way they structured that thing. I wanna copy that."NT: Exactly.MR: It's definitely a form of—imitation is really important. Imitating, what other people doing, but then—I think that Natalie or Austin Kleon often talks about this idea that copying is helpful because as much as you try to copy that other person, you're not gonna get an exact copy. Eventually, your personality's gonna come through on it and you're gonna add your own little tweaks and twists and it becomes your own without you really realizing it. There is definitely a benefit to copying people to get better and figure out where you're going. That's very helpful.NT: Yeah. Definitely.MR: For you, Sylvia Duckworth, I guess is probably one of those key figures that you were trying not so much to copy, but to emulate and to follow and produce something on the level of Sylvia that would communicate the way you saw it impacted you, which is really, really fun to hear.NT: Yeah, exactly. I really love her work.MR: I'm really curious about what is some exciting sketchnoting-related project that you're working on. You mentioned mental health sketch notes, is where you're at. Is there one that you're doing now or a series or something maybe that's coming up that you're excited about that you could share with us?NT: Yes. In general, I love doing sketch notes on mental health. I think that came about with if I was having a particular struggle, I would just Google that struggle. It might be overthinking, for example, which is one of my more popular sketch notes, and I'd just put into Google ways to stop overthinking.Rather than just read that article and come away with maybe a point that I was gonna try that week and then forget about, I would start sketch noting that and sketch note podcast and books to actually learn from that. Then the bonus is that then helping other people. I've got a project coming up with a lead in mental health psychology publication that I'm gonna do a collaborative post with, and that's gonna be on four ways on how to be kind to yourself.MR: Oh, wow.NT: It's in the similar realm to the overthinking one that I've done. What's interesting is sometimes, I've noticed my friends who are very supportive and family, they'll come up with ideas and say, "Have you thought about doing this?" One thing that I'm doing at the moment is baby sketch notes.I've got quite a few friends who are having babies at the moment. One of my friends said, "Have you thought about doing a baby sketch note about the day they were born?" I took that idea and thought of different ways to make it a bit more interesting. It's like what song is number one at the time, the horoscope, the Chinese zodiac, and actually, getting those printed and framed for friends and people who'd like them.That's a very recent thing that I've started to do. I've recently done some work with an ADHD podcast who they thought it would be really interesting to sketch note one of their podcast episodes. That's been fascinating as well because I did the sketch note and my style, it is a little bit more wordy than some people's and there can be a lot going on.When she shared it on her channel, there was a lot of really positive feedback of those people saying—I remember one comment that said something like, "I'd absolutely love a whole book like illustrated in this way on ADHD because it's exactly how my brain works."But then there was a few comments that said the complete opposite in that it's just too overwhelming and there's too much to take in, so it's interesting how it works in that way. For some people it resonates and some people it just doesn't work for them in completely opposite extremes.MR: Right. I've got kids that have ADHD, and the two boys that have it, the way they react to it is quite different. They have different experiences. I think within ADHD, you could have someone with ADHD who thinks, "This is amazing, this is the way I think." Then somebody else who's got a slight variation of it would be overwhelming to them. Just people, in general, that can't maybe get into it. I think that's the nature of just humans.NT: Yeah, exactly.MR: If I go to my Amazon page and look at the reviews, there's quite a few good reviews, but there's some bad ones too. I'm a fan of Seth Godin, and he says, "Once you release your book into the world, you just stop looking at the reviews because the book now belongs to the public and you can't really do anything. It belongs to them. Looking at reviews doesn't do you any good." So, I don't.NT: That's really good. Well done on the self-discipline there. 'Cause yeah, I can imagine it's tempted to rake through them and then you've got to try and train your brain to focus on the positive ones, I guess.MR: It was probably harder at the beginning when there was very few 'cause I felt like we had a technical issue with the Kindle version that a lot of people complained about. If you look way back in the—all the one-star reviews are Kindle failures which we had no control over. It just must have been so a technical accident. We eventually sorted it out and got it solved, but in the meantime, there's all these one-star reviews, which you can't really remove.That feeling like you have to answer like what happened over and over again, and there's nothing you can do, but at some point, you just kinda let it go. The book's been around for 10 years, so that's more important than if there's enough good reviews on the book. In some ways, maybe that's the same thing when you do a sketch note, there's just gonna be people that don't relate to it and it doesn't work for them and that's okay.NT: Yeah. That's very true.MR: It's better to focus on the ones who it does resonate with because they will appreciate it and then you can make them the audience that you are thinking about as you're doing your work. Those people will really like it, and if someone else doesn't, there's plenty more on social media to look at. You don't have to look at my thing.NT: Exactly. They're also different on them with sketch noting styles. I find it fascinating and I don't think you necessarily—I mean, I didn't kind of set out with a style in. Especially, probably the last year, I think a particular style, but when I look back at the ones when I started sketch note and maybe seven, eight years ago on my little iPad they're just completely different.I use all wild colors and whereas now they're quite toned back and I'll just use one color, but that's kind of learning as you go. The podcast has been absolutely amazing, hearing about different techniques and tools and tips. That's really, really helped.MR: I just happened to pop up Instagram here and head it up so I could be aware of your stuff. I happen to look at six reasons to visit Maple and Doe, which I assume is a little shop that you like. It's just really straightforward and simple and fun. There's six really simple.I think the thing too that sketchnoting does, just by the nature of how it works, is you typically have everything on one page. You don't have to look through multiple pages. You can just get everything on a page and look through it. I can definitely see, if I scan back through your stuff, as you keep on improving, you keep on trying new things and that's really good to see.It does make sense now that you tell me that your background is in writing and that's a real strong thing for you. Me too, for my book, I wrote the whole manuscript before I drew a single thing. I think in words too. Sometimes I have to remind myself, "Okay, you can draw something, Mike." I can do like lettering and text and still have fun with the layouts and stuff and just little images sprinkled in and that's okay.It's nice that there's that variation. You could be really visual and do lots of drawings and very little text on one side and then on the other side you could be very textual with just drawings as little sprinkles, and anywhere in between there, which it's great that the sketch note community is so varied that everybody can come at it and express it in their way, which is great to see.NT: Exactly. That's really interesting that you said that you've have tended to think more in text form as well, and visuals and illustrations are brilliant. I would never have thought that it come from the other way around, if that makes sense.MR: It surprises people. A lot of times for me to solve a problem, I might write out the problem first. Then it enters into my verbal side, to quote Doug Niell. Then once I understand it verbally, because that's how I was trained as a kid, then I can engage the visual side of me, which I probably did more drawing before I knew how to write and read. Those then kick in and layer on top of it. It's pretty fun.Well, that sounds like a really fun project. I can't wait to see when it comes out. As later on in the show we'll send you to Natalie's social media connection so you can go follow her work and see when those pop up. Let's shift into tools. Now that I see some of your work, I would love to hear, what are your favorite pens? Do you have favorite notebooks? Then, of course, second would be your digital tools, how you use digital tools.NT: I mentioned earlier, I got into sketch noting via the digital side. It was only through the podcast and when I ordered your book that I realized a lot of people start off on analog. I was still doing them digitally even though I knew that, 'cause I couldn't get my head around how—'cause I'd started digitally, I couldn't get my head around how you would know how everything would fit onto one page.I'd start off and then I'd make it a lot smaller and push it to one corner. I was like, "I can't do that on a piece of paper." It was on a whim that I was out trying to find some trainers, I couldn't find any. I went into this shop called The Works that we have in the UK. I think they have it in the U.S., but it's not as much of a big thing in the U.S. I don't think. It's books, stationary. It tends to have things really good discount. I got this little—I know you won't be able to see it if you're just listening, but just like a really small one. Small little sketchbook.MR: That's a square sketchbook with a hard cover and spiral binding, I guess, is the word.NT: Yeah, exactly. It's got slightly thicker than printer paper. I thought I could just start doing some little mini-ones. At the same time, I picked up some brush pens, and I started writing with the brush pens and they were absolutely brilliant. I thought actually I could start doing that.I don't think the sketchbooks got a particular name. The brush pens that I first started using are called Crawford & Black really cheap in The Works here in the UK. Then as I progressed with the paper side, I found this old sketchbook that I'd had—like I said, I've not called myself an artist. I wouldn't sit and drawing a sketchbook, but I kept holding onto this book. I think I was thinking I might use it as a scrapbook. I'd had it for years.That's very similar to the one I've just mentioned, but it's much bigger and it's also square, so it lends itself really well to Instagram post. For the actual pens, just a few months ago, Sharpie gel pens, their 0.7. Yeah. I found they're really good for doing a lot of the actual words on the sketch notes. Then Staedtler, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.Staedtler brush pens. I got them in lots of different colors. I use the thick side of that to do titles. Then I'll use the Sharpie gel pen to do the actual text and little drawings. I've got a bigger pencil case, but then I've got like a tiny really thin one that keeps maybe three or four pens. I'll try and keep that tiny one and then my little sketchbook in my bag wherever I go. I've got it in my bags.MR: Rough and ready in your go-bag, which is cool.NT: Yeah.MR: That sketchbook is the one you have with you, right?NT: Exactly.MR: That's good. You mentioned the Sharpie gel pens. I've been really impressed with those as well. We have them in the States and tried them in the past and really like the ink that they've manufactured is really smooth and dark. Seems to dry pretty quickly. I've been really impressed with the, I think it's labeled the S-gel here. I don't know if that's the same there, but it's Sharpie gel.NT: Yeah, it is.MR: If you're listening and you haven't tried the Sharpie gel pens, give it a try. They of course make alcohol-based permanent markers of all kinds that you can pick up, but they will bleed through most paper unless it's thick. They do have a alcohol scent to them. That's something you consider. The gel would be scentless. I think if I'm right, the gel pens are also water resistant at least or maybe waterproof, I'm not sure.I think once it goes on the page, if it gets wet, it's not gonna wash away like say a regular felt tip marker that's not permanent. I think both those are permanent markers. That's interesting you mentioned the Staedtler brush pens. It's the two-sided, right? So, there's two ends, right?NT: Exactly. Yeah. I forgot to say that.MR: Those are nice pens. I've seen those around. I've not tried them much. I need to go to the Office supply store and load up on some new things.NT: Yeah. That's the thing with this podcast, you're just like, "Oh, I wanna try that and I wanna try that."MR: Spending your money. Spending your money.NT: Exactly.MR: Talk a little bit about your digital. You said you started with digital. You hinted at Procreate. Is that the tool that you still use? Have you found any other tools and then tell us about this Japanese stylus or have you upgraded to an Apple pencil, or what's your digital status?NT: With digital, I don't think I mentioned earlier, but a huge part of the sketch note journey for me and starting to share sketch notes was getting an iPad Pro 'cause I did find it very difficult with this stylus I had, it was a stylus that has a little plastic circle on the end.MR: Oh, I know. I had this one, yeah. I know which one you're talking about.NT: It wasn't very precise. I found it quite difficult. It was the second main COVID lockdown and had a lot of time on my hands. I was sketch noting more, but they just took quite a while and the surface was quite small in the iPad mini.My manager in my previous role nominated our team for this special award thing. We won that so we each got a 300-pound voucher to use on a variety of—you could just spend it on clothes, holidays, et cetera. I thought, "Oh, this might be my excuse to get an iPad Pro because I'd wanted one for so long.MR: Covered a good part of it, right?NT: Exactly. It was COVID and I wasn't going on holiday, I'd managed to save a little bit of money because obviously, we weren't going anywhere. That was a big part of it, but when I chatted with friends and family about, "Oh, shall I get this iPad Pro?" I made a pact with myself. If I was going to do that, then I would have to share some of the sketch notes. I made a little pack with myself to do that.It was when I started sharing the sketch notes that I think I must've started using #sketchnote and I'd click on that, and I think that's when I came across your work, Sketch Army. Obviously, I came across things like the Visual Jam, Sketch Effect, Sketch Academy, all of these things, and I was like, wow.Yeah, it's called still Procreate. Again, I thought if I'm getting the iPad Pro, I'm gonna get the proper pencil. One thing that I do use, because I don't use an Apple phone, I don't have an iPhone, but I love my iPad. I wanted somewhere of things transferring across easy. I use a combination of Evernote and Noteshelf.You can get Noteshelf only of the iPad, I think, but then Evernote you can sync it so that anything you do on Noteshelf syncs. Ofter, 'cause I use sketch notes and I don't necessarily share, but in kind of planning and productivity and so, I'll sometimes plan my day out in sketch note form. I have done that on my iPad. I want it on my phone so I've got it when I'm going around and I can't really drag the iPad around.MR: Then that syncs over. Now it's on your phone wherever you are or on your desktop I suppose, if you've got Evernote there.NT: Yeah, exactly.MR: That's a smart idea. I think there's lots of these integrations that often to get overlooked that could make the connection between, like, I like this tool but I wanna use it this way. There's likely some kind of connection or there's a way to do it, I suppose. That's pretty cool.NT: Yeah, definitely.MR: It'd be interesting to see, and I haven't explored Evernote for a long time, if Evernote's in improved their drawing tools in that you could technically draw on Evernote on the iPad. I suspect there must be an iPad app of Evernote, but I don't know what kind of drawing capabilities it has. Maybe it doesn't have very good ones and it would be more frustrating. Helpful, right?NT: I can't remember why I didn't just use Evernote as the actual tool 'cause I use Noteshelf and it syncs to Evernote. I think it's 'cause NoteShelf was like a one-off fee of maybe 10 pounds and maybe—MR: Yeah, it has a subscription.NT: Whereas Evernote has a subscription, but you can use the free version to sync.MR: Got it.NT: It does have some nice tools. I'm not sure why I haven't really used it more.MR: I know Noteshelf's really powerful. It's a tool. I think that's what I use to present from when I editing presentations.NT: Oh really?MR: Because I can move the pages around, I can present, and then the way I teach sketch noting, is I like to draw right on the presentation. The cool thing is when I'm done then I can just export that to a PDF and send it to the students and it's all bundled up. It's the thing they saw, it matches the recording if they see the recording, and it's a really convenient tool. I find Noteshelf really great.NT: That's brilliant. Yeah, it's really good.MR: I did not know that it synced with Evernote. I'm not an Evernote user, but that's really good information to know in case I run into it Evernote user, and tools are pretty helpful. I think all those note-taking tools, their tools have gotten a lot better. That's really great.NT: Definitely. When I listen to the podcast and people recommend new tools and Concepts as the sponsor, I always wanna try these things, which sometimes I just don't get the time to sit and explore. I think especially 'cause doing it analog is quite new for me. That's an avenue I'm exploring.I think one of the other reasons I started to explore analog is because Procreate had an update and the pens just became too complicated and it just wasn't working. Now I've found the right brush again on Procreate, so I'm doing a mixture. There's a nice feature where you can favorite the brush thickness, which is really, really useful.MR: I've used that too. Very useful. Now we're getting nerdy, but on the Procreate size control, if you press and hold in a certain location, you can lock it and a little mark will appear there and then you can jump from mark to mark.NT: When I come across that, I thought, this is amazing 'cause I'll have one for the headers and one for the sub-headers or even just the little doodles. It's so much easy 'cause before, I think that's why I was making some things massive, something small and I just lost track of what was meant to be what.MR: Then you're using the same brush and you're just changing the size of it. You just touch the size you want and away you go, which is nice.NT: Exactly.MR: Cool. Well, now we're at the point where we talk about tips. The way I frame it is someone's listening, they're a visual thinker of some level, whatever that might mean to them, and they're excited, they like the community, they like doing sketchnoting, but they feel maybe they're stagnating or they're in a plateau or just need a little inspiration. It's wintertime here in the north so maybe they just need a little inspiration like spring is coming, whatever, but what would be three things you would tell that person to encourage them?NT: I'm not sure if I've got four or not.MR: Or you can do more than three if you wish. That's fine.NT: I certainly thought of lots of tips. The first thing I would say in line with, I'm not saying everyone needs an iPad Pro but just investing in what you love. If you love sketch noting and it is investing and that might be in time or courses. That's really helped me is just dedicating a bit of time and sometimes money to get a really good course and it can really elevate your sketch notes to the next level.It'll just get you back into it again. Often the course is a collaborative so you meet different people as well, which is helpful and learn from others. That's one thing I would say. But then equally, as much as it's invest and improve, I wanted to say recognize what your strengths are.For some people, they might be held back because there's the comparison thing, like what we were discussing earlier and you see some sketch notes that are very visual and these amazing illustrations that I love looking at. I've had to reframe that 'cause I've had sometimes, moments of lack of confidence thinking, "Oh, mine are quite wordy. I'm never gonna be a natural illustrator."I've had to think, "Well, my strength might be more in the sense of listening to a podcast and picking out the key points. That's something that I do in my professional role as a market manager is I might have to take it an academic paper and try and present it in a nice way.That's something that I've had to think is, what are my strengths are. I would say to people focus on your strengths as well as try and improve your weaknesses 'cause everyone's sketch notes are different.MR: That's a great tip. I love that one.NT: Thank you. Another tip is to share your work. I know it's not for everyone, but if you are sometimes stuck in a rut, it can help to share your work and break that barrier. 'Cause I kept my sketch note secret for years, the ones that I did on mental health and things. Some of them that I've shared I did maybe four years ago and just didn't post, but that can really help get you work out there and get feedback. Also, if you're sharing them on social media, it helps to connect you with people.MR: I suppose you could even frame that as maybe sharing, doesn't have to be with the world, but maybe it's a small group. If there's some chat or something where you can share that work. That's considered sharing. If it's two tens of your best friends, you're still announcing to your friends and they can give you feedback.NT: Exactly, and that's actually what I did first. I just started sending them—During COVID, I'd send them in WhatsApp group chats and people are like, "Oh wow. How have you not shared these before?" It's kind of like deeping your toes in it first.MR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You go to the friendly audience first because social media cannot always be friendly, right?NT: No, exactly. That's very true.MR: Interesting.NT: Another one is just to write down your ideas. Sometimes I find if you're out and about and you're out in nature or you're away for the weekend, I think you sometimes get inspiration for sketch notes, but if you don't write them down and I'll keep them in—I've got Google Keeps, I'll just keep a little ideas list and just throw them in there. It means that when I am sat at home with my sketchbook or some time and my iPad Pro, I can actually bring that idea to life rather than thinking, "What was that again?" That's been really helpful.MR: Some kind of reference. Some kind of a spark. That's Good.NT: Exactly. I dunno whether I'm onto fifth tip now, I'm not sure.MR: I only count them later.NT: One is just get involved with the community as well. That's a tip that I would recommend. There's been a few that I've been involved with lately, monthly hangouts and your layouts workshop. I think that's just really helpful, and again, it's learning from people. You might get tips that you've not thought of that might take 10 minutes. I think one of your previous guests, I think it was Reverend Geek, said he had a 30-day challenge where he would just sketch out a word for 30 days, but sometimes he'd get those ideas from other people and communities that you're part of.MR: We have that. If you want an easy one, Sketchnote Army has a Slack channel you can join.NT: Oh, really?MR: Yep. Every day there's someone in one of the channels who posts the prompt and you can be challenged to draw it in. They challenge you to draw it in 30 seconds or something, so it builds your thinking skills. We have that channel.Also, probably the other benefit of that channel is any kind of events that happen. Lai Chee Chui, who's one of the members, she's like a hawk. She finds every of cool event and she publishes it in the events announcements channel. You'll find out about workshops or the Visual Jam we'll post in there so you get a sense of like what's coming, which is great.NT: How brilliant. That sounds great. Yeah. I'd love to join that. Thank you.MR: If you go to sketchnotearmy.com/slack, should take you to the page and you can sign up for free. It's all free. We just—NT: Brilliant. I'm just writing that down.MR: We don't save any of the back channel 'cause we're just doing the free one, but it's more spur of the moment, the interaction between people in the community, which is pretty cool. Anybody that's listening, including Natalie are welcomed to sign up and hang out in there, there's a really cool bunch of people in there.Your public sharing could be in the Slack channel with friendly sketch noters who will give you encouragement, which we aim to have our community be an encouraging community. I think that's a good place to start if you wanted to follow that tip that Natalie just gave.NT: Brilliant.MR: I'll be sure to count up the tips and I'll give them numbers to them in the show notes. Of course, we'll have show notes for all the things we've talked about. We're near the end of the podcast. Can you believe it? Like, suddenly this time has just flown by.NT: It has.MR: I would love for you to share what's the best places to go. Are there certain social media where you hang out? Is there a website we can go to to find out all the work that you're up to?NT: The main place that I share my sketch notes is Instagram and that's @natalierobertat. I also use LinkedIn, but that's Natalie R. Taylor. I did set up an actual LinkedIn page, but I just tend to not post on that end. I don't actually post my schedule notes very much on LinkedIn, but I do use it. I set up a Twitter, but again, I've posted it a few times and not really used it a lot. So, I would say Instagram.MR: Okay. Got it. We'll make sure we put a link to that. I'm on your page now and it looks like you've got a campsite bio page with some specific things that you'd like people to check out first. That's nice that you got an extended list of things for people to dig into. That's really good and you can see her work there.Well, Natalie, this has been so much fun. Thank you for joining us on the show and sharing your experience and encouraging people. I think it's, again, another great episode that will encourage somebody out there who we can't even imagine right now who's listening to this episode and being inspired and trying something out, which is what this is all about. Thank you for making time to be here.NT: Thank you so much for having me. I've absolutely loved it and I love the idea that it could help someone, so thank you for saying that.MR: I think so. I think it definitely will help someone. I'm often surprised, I think I do these podcasts and often you don't really hear much back and that's okay, I don't do it for that reason. But occasionally I'll talk to someone and say, I've listened to every one of your episodes. It's happened like four or five times recently. All the effort that you put into it, you think like, "Is anybody listening to this?"I see people downloading it, but you don't hear anything, and then suddenly four or five people say, I listen to every episode. Like, wow, okay, well I guess we're gonna keep doing that. It's really encouraging and it's definitely gonna be encouraging to someone and many people potentially. That's really great to hear.NT: Thank you. I've absolutely loved listening to the podcast when I discovered it and it was lockdown as well, so I'll go for these long walks and I've listening to maybe two, three a day just thinking, I was like, "Wow, there's eight or nine series of this?"MR: You're like a super fan, Natalie.NT: Yeah, I am. They we're kinda packed into a certain time. I think I'm up to date now. There might be a few I've missed.MR: It's quite a back catalog. Well, thank you so much and I think for everyone who's listening, that's another episode of the "Sketch Note Army Podcast." Until the next episode, we'll see you soon.

Edmund Gröpl, a retired engineer, merges his passion for sketchnoting with the Zettelkasten method to transform self-organized learning. He reflects on rediscovering childhood creativity and the vital role of visuals in enhancing communication. Edmund shares insights on effective note management, emphasizing digital tools like Obsidian. He discusses the importance of community in overcoming creative blocks and highlights techniques for integrating visuals into notes, all while inspiring listeners to embrace curiosity and collaboration in their learning journeys.

In this episode, Mawusi Amoaku, a fashion designer turned educator shares how stumbling on sketchnoting helped her overcome learning challenges which she now shares with students that have special learning needs.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’ infinite canvas lets you sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea, or keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most.The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Mawusi?Origin StoryMawusi's current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find MawusiOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.Mawusi on InstagramMoonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer.Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley and David KelleyThe Sketchnote Handbook by Mike RohdeThe International Sketchnote Camp 2021Sketchnote Army PodcastToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.A4 sheets of paperFriXion penMUJI penPaper Mate InkJoy highlighterSTABILO BOSS gray highlighterTombow markerClairefontaine dot grid paperClipboardTransparent clipboardLED lightbulbRhodia Staplebound NotepadiPad ProApple pencilConcepts AppProcreateTipsContinue feeding your mind.Even if you go digital, keep drawing by hand.Don't overthink it. Just do it.Be open to trying something new.Listen to other sketchnoters.Share your work.Experience with other layouts, find out what works for you.Collaborate with your colleagues.Ask for feedback.Be intentional and tell someone your goal.Don't give up. Be patient.CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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 am here with my friend, Mawusi Amoaku. How are you doing, Mawusi?Mawusi Amoaku: I'm doing good, Mike.MR: It's so good to have you.MA: How are you?MR: I'm doing great. It's always great for me to have someone interesting on the show to talk about their visual thinking journey and the work they do and the impact they're having. And I feel like you're someone who definitely is doing that. And I love to share those stories.I think that's the core reason why the podcast exists is to just reveal really interesting people all around the world doing great things in the visual thinking space. So, with that, why don't you tell us, give us an introduction, who you are and what you do.MA: Okay. My name is Mawusi Amoaku, and I'm originally from Ghana. Grew up in Northern Ireland, hence my accent. I work in education supporting learners with additional learning needs, and I love it.MR: As I understand, in our chats that led up to having you on the show, you've pretty recently discovered Sketchnoting. I would love to hear your origin story around that. Where did that come from? And maybe look back to when you were a little girl, like, have you been drawing since you were a little girl? And how did those two worlds and your teaching all overlap into where you are today?MA: I think I'll start by telling you a little bit about me growing up. I've always loved drawing. When I was younger, I wanted to be an artist. And I love hand lettering and I love making zines. In terms of drawing, well, I try to draw something every day.I stumbled across sketchnotes in 2020 and it really transformed my learning experience. Although I work in education, I had to do a course as part of my job role to help me support my learners with learning needs. And I was finding the course particularly difficult because when I would read my textbook and make notes, when I came to writing the assignments, I would just forget everything. And I was so frustrated. Like I started to fall behind with my assignments, which I thought, this is ironic because what I do, I support learners to get their assignments done. Here I am, I can't even do my own.I didn't wanna tell anyone that I was struggling, so I just kinda had an idea. I thought to myself, "If this was one of my students, what would I say?" Like, I would encourage them to keep going, but I would encourage them to find another way. So, one day I just thought, right, I'm just gonna Google it.I was so behind with my work, I really didn't have time to be doing this, but I thought, I'm gonna have to try and find some answers. So yeah, I went on the internet and I researched and I came up with mnemonics, memory palace, mine maps, and finally, sketch notes. And that changed everything.So, for me, the first sketch note I made was of a "TED Talk" because I bought your book and I wanted to find out like, straight away, does this thing work. Should I continue with it or not? 'Cause I need to know that I'm investing my time wisely.And I sketch noted, I think it was called The Greatest Ted Talk Ever Told, I think that's the name of it. I was like, 20 minutes long. And I was like, I don't even know if I still have the sketchnote, but I remember the video. And I sketchnoted that and I thought, "Oh, wow."And then when I read my textbook, there were certain topics that I was really struggling with. So, I decided, I'm going to sketch note this, but I set myself boundaries 'cause I used to write pages and pages of notes and never read it, even though I used different colored pens, et cetera. I thought, okay, I'm gonna limit myself to an A4 sheet of paper per topic.I went to the glossary in the—when you talk about creating an icon library, I thought, okay, so for each topic, I'll look at the glossary and write down what those keywords are to create my icon library. And then I'll read a chapter and then I will sketch note it and that's it.I did that for each of the chapters, particularly the ones I was struggling with. Then I used those notes to write my assignments. I have to say, before I started doing that, I just thought, why am I not remembering this information? Why I'm not understanding this?But then when I sketchnoted it, I was so encouraged because I realized I do know it, I do understand it, and I can do it. So, it really helped me with my confidence. And I did the work.I have to say I was really behind with my work, but I did it. I got it done, I got my assignments in on time. And I remember thinking, you know, I actually do love learning, but that experience was so negative for me that I thought, now I kind of understand how some of our students feel when they can't understand a piece of work because it does knock your confidence, it does make you feel stressed, it does make you feel isolated.For me, I was too embarrassed to tell anyone because that was actually my job was to help other people. And I couldn't help myself. When I got to the end of the course, what I couldn't understand was I—the course was not finished, but I wanted to keep learning 'cause it was just so addictive. Like to do the sketch notes it was such a fun activity to do.It was right at the summertime, so I kept learning it. I kept researching effective ways to learn and reading different books that inspired me. One of them was "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Josh Foer, I think is how you pronounce his name. He talks about using the memory palace as a way to remember information.I was just fascinated. I was hooked. And then I thought, "Oh my goodness, I wouldn't mind doing another course." From not wanting to do the course that I did, I wanted to keep learning. Well, I started looking for opportunities. Any opportunity to sketchnote.At that point, I hadn't shared my work with anyone. It was just for myself. Towards the end of 2021—no, end of 2020, 2021, my New Year's resolution, I kept it pretty open and creative, was to invest in myself. That would primarily be learning a new skill and also, trying things that I probably wouldn't normally try 'cause I would be afraid to do it.One of them was actually public speaking. You know, do a workshop for my colleagues because I am a shy person. I'm an introvert, and the idea of speaking in front of any group of people scares me. So, that January, like that whole year actually, I started thinking, what if, what if? And starting to do different things, and showing my work.In terms of the sketch notes, I didn't actually use it at work initially. I tried to fight the urge to sketchnote. I really wanted to do it, but I was kind of worried what people would think.My background is art, actually, it's fashion design. Everyone knows that I love to draw, but I thought that if I drew at work, maybe people would think that I wasn't taking my job seriously. Or like, "Why is she doodling? Why are you doing that?"One time in a class I was supporting a group of students and nearly all of the students in the class had a learning need. I used to find it really difficult to support the group 'cause the needs vary a lot. I remember observing one student in particular who really struggled to understand what he needed to do.In the class, the students would rely on me to take notes. And I remember thinking, well, my handwriting's not great, and if they don't understand the notes, probably my handwriting. But I kind of thought I'd like the students to read the notes, use them, understand them, and become more independent.I thought if I sketch note this—it was partly 'cause I was struggling to write down the traditional way, but I thought if I sketch note this, maybe they'll be so curious, they'll want to read it. I really wanted them to want to read it and use it.I started to do it. And I shared that with the teacher because I was supporting the students in the class, I wasn't the teacher. I shared what I wanted to do with the teacher. I told them that this is a new thing that I'm learning. I would like to get better at it. Perhaps could I do it in this class? Because I feel that the more I do it, the better I get. And if I do every single day, I'm definitely gonna improve.He was really supportive and I started to use it. At first, the students didn't really know what to make of it. They're like, "Mawusi, you are drawing? Oh, my goodness. Like, what is this? This is serious."I thought, oh dear, I have to tell them this is really important. You're supposed to use this. So, I give them a little speech. I said, you know, "Yes, it took a lot of effort, but I'm doing this because I want you to do well. I really want you to enjoy your learning, but I want you to use the notes, understand it, use it, but not to rely on me to learn that you can do these things for yourself as well."And so, I did it. Then the next day I was like, oh, I might have to reinforce that. I started to do my little speech, and they said, "Mawusi, we know you told us yesterday." I never mentioned it again. And so, I kept doing it.It was during the pandemic, so we were in our bubbles. That meant a unique opportunity. I got to stay with my students in the various classes that they were in. And I continued to sketch note in each of those classes. They got used to it.I didn't have to say anything.What happened was the teacher would deliver the lesson and I would have a clipboard sketch note the lesson, scan it, and share. We use Microsoft Teams. I would share it on Teams and all the students would have access to those notes.One of the unexpected dividends, I guess, of doing that was it meant that students who have learning needs could use it, but everybody could use it. Whether they have a learning need or not. And if someone misses a lesson, they have those notes to help them to catch up.It was tiring, and a part of me wondered why I even started because I didn't actually have an end plan for when I would stop doing this. So, I would ask the teacher, "Would you like me to stop?" I kind of secretly hoping he would say, "It's okay, Mawusi. You can stop." And he is like, "No, keep going. It's all right. Keep going. And I said, "But they're not using it". He's like, "They're using it. Walk around the class."The first student who we went to, I hadn't said anything and within minutes of me sharing it on Teams, he had printed the notes and he was looking at it. I should actually clarify that this was a media lesson and so they work on computers. He was referring to the notes and doing his work.I hadn't had to say anything to any of the students. They knew the pattern, this is what happens in class. Then he said, "Okay, keep walking around." I noticed that they were all using it, but in their own way, whether it could be on the screen or on their phone or if they printed it out, but they were just doing their work.And I was like, "Oh my goodness, it actually works." I was so happy I just wanted to do a happy dance, but obviously, I was working so I didn't. But yeah, so that's kind of how it started in the classroom.I made some revision notes because I wanted to encourage my students to revise 'cause not a lot of them would revise for their exams. The exciting thing about the sketch notes was that I later found that they were being shared by other tutors. It gave an opportunity for me to talk about my work.And actually, one of the key things was, although I made the sketch notes for the students, I didn't really know what I was doing. It was an experiment. And I asked them for feedback. And the feedback from the students was invaluable because that's how I improved it.For example, one of the parameters that I set for myself, which was limit the information to one page, didn't necessarily work for the students because it was actually too much information on one page.MR: Really?MA: Yeah. So, with each sketch note I made, I would make changes because they were giving me constant feedback. And then tutors gave me valuable feedback. For example, because my handwriting's terrible, I used to write in capitals because that's my way of writing neatly.One of the dyslexia specialist tutors said, "Well, actually that's really hard for someone to read if they have dyslexia, 'cause it's the shape of the letters that helps them to differentiate the words."Well, had to kind of retrain my brain to write in lowercase as well. It was just really useful to share the sketch notes as a way to improve, but also yeah, to share my skills.But Mike, I have to say you did influence me a lot in that because I attended the sketchnote workshop, or no, the sketchnote camp that was held online in 2021. And your keynote speech was about care and service and community.And how we as sketchnoters 'cause we are a global community as Sketchnoters can do good to our organizations that we work for our communities. We are in a very specific situation in the pandemic and it's affecting all of us in different ways. How can we use those skills to benefit others?That was what encouraged me actually because up to that point, I was doing it for myself, but then I thought, well actually there is a community of people who are doing this and I'm going do it in my workplace and I'm gonna share it.I'm not online, but I'm gonna share it in the space where I work. And I hope that it'll benefit other people. But really the driving force for me to share sketchnotes is that I was really desperate when I find it. And I was thinking somebody else might be in a similar situation and I hope it helps them.MR: It's really funny because that's my origin story. I was desperate as well. The way I was taking notes was just so frustrating and I'd forced myself like you to l to limit myself to a small notebook and switched from pencil to pen.The experiment that I first did really set me on the path to say, "Hey, this is working for me. I really enjoy this. I can't wait for the next workshop or event that I can go try this and experiment with. "So very much similar in that way. And hoping, you know, if this is working for me, there has to be somebody else who this will help. And then also, you know, sharing it with other people and getting feedback was a similar experience.It sounds like yours was even more, I guess, accelerated because you didn't have a lot of time, you just had to keep working and then taking feedback live and then incorporating it as you worked, which is probably good for you.You almost got into a mode, it seemed to me like where you were just doing the work, you're getting feedback, you're making modifications, and next thing you know, you're writing upper and lower case, you're modifying the structure and you're serving.It seems to me like you're someone who, if you're serving someone else, you're willing to kind of jump through hoops and go over fire and do these things because you know it's gonna help your students.In some ways, doing it for yourself, you sort of run into a point where like, "Uh, I don't feel like doing it anymore. Who's there to hold you accountable?" But you found an accountability group, which were your students who actually gave you the feedback and held you accountable and pushed you further to really accelerate your learning. And also, it ultimately benefited them, right? Because your sketchnotes started to align for what their needs were. Is that a fair way to think of that?MA: I would think so. I think the desperation I felt at the beginning was something for a long time that I actually tried to forget. And I remember telling my boss this, and she said something to me, which was quite profound. She said you know, "It is giving you more empathy for your students." And that is exactly it.I've always loved learning, but I've never struggled to the extent that I struggle that time. But I'm really glad for that experience, well, because I share that with the students. I tell them I struggle.But when you struggle, you always have a choice. You know, you can find another way. You don't need to give up. It's kind of like if you see it as an opportunity to do it a different way, basically that is what I learned. And that is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about this because I'm so lucky I stumbled across it.It was actually when I read a book about the memory palace, it was a free book on Apple Books. And then I found another free book about sketch notes. It was basically a compilation created by educators and they were talking about the benefits of sketch notes and they shared examples of theirs.And that's where I heard about your mini-workshop, which was on YouTube. So, I watched the video and then I was like, that is actually why I bought the book. 'Cause I was like, "I need to do this. This is it."I have to say thank you to those people for putting the art there because I would never have found it. One of the other reasons why I was confident that it would work with my students was your episode where you interviewed Laura Kazan, I think you pronounce her name.MR: Yes, yes, yes.MA: That episode actually—I have listened to every episode of your podcast. I'll just tell you that, and the reason being, I wanted to learn as much as possible from your interviews with different people of and how they've used it. But her interview really stood out for me because I thought, "Those are my students. Those are my students, and I think they will benefit from this."One of the things she said at the end of her interview was, in her three tips, she said, "Is your school special education department willing to support sketchnoting."I thought as a department that I worked for in my college. So that is what give me the confidence to share it with my team because, you know, it made such a difference to her son, and I thought, well, it might just help our students as well.So, your podcast helped me a lot because there was something that I was doing by myself, but in listening to your interviews with other podcasters or other sketchnoters, I kind of felt like I wasn't by myself in doing this. I was so encouraged. So, thank you.MR: Oh, that's really great to hear. You know often doing podcasts can be a lonely business because you do these interviews and of course, they're enjoyable in the moment and you publish and there's often not a ton of feedback that I receive back from the episodes, but I keep doing them because I enjoy it.I think that's the driving force. And I know that there are people, and I know that because I hear like you and others who will say, yeah, I've listened to all the episodes. I can't wait for another one to come out. So, I know there are fans out there, which is, you know, really exciting and helpful, and especially when I hear it in the context of your—I would call your experience a journey, right.You sort of definitely went on this journey where you kept on discovering something else and that led you to something else and that led you to something else. And you continued to follow the thread all the way to kind of where you're at now, which is really cool because I think so many, you know, with the internet especially stumbling onto something can lead to something else if you allow it to if you're curious and you follow that path.I think that's a good reminder for us that sometimes it's just being open to something and taking it one step further might lead to something that you could never have expected. Your story, your origin story here sounds exactly like that. That string, you just kept pulling the string and now here you are.MA: Yeah. Actually, one of the reasons why I'm excited is for quite a few years, I have been looking for a passion. You know, my background is fashion design, I like to sew, and I love education, but I was looking for something that I would be really passionate about. And this is definitely it. So yeah, I love it.MR: Wow. Well, I love your origin story. Thank you for sharing all the detail and giving us insights and where those pivot points were. I would love to hear is there a project of any kind may be that you're beginning that you're excited about that you'd love to share with us.MA: I guess I would say is I've had more opportunities to share sketch notes with my colleagues and I've been in training staff on how to sketchnote. For me, someone who I said is kind of an introvert. I find it really hard to talk to people. This is like a watershed moment.I have to say the sharing of sketch notes has just helped me develop more confidence in myself. So yeah, that's something. And this year, in particular, the college that I work for the focus is on inclusion.So, as I started to share my sketch notes, last year we had a guest speaker and he's an inclusion expert. And I decided long before the event, I am definitely gonna sketch note this. Only I didn't wanna tell anyone because I didn't wanna put pressure in myself.So, I sat at the back and I made some sketchnotes, worked on it over the summer, and then my goal was I'm going to share it with my colleagues because I wanna tell more people, but I wanted to sketchnote something that we had all attended so that it would be more meaningful.And the exciting thing is this has led to more opportunities to sketchnote for different departments. I've done collaborations with colleagues who are specialists in different fields, and we've combined our skills to train other staff.So, yeah, it's such a fun thing to do, but it's a really useful way to communicate things that might be quite difficult to communicate in words basically. It's very engaging and I'm excited that I did it and that it's being shared.MR: That's really great. I love your approach of doing something that would be meaningful to the entire group so they could benefit from it. That's a really great way of layering two things you're passionate about sketchnoting and also about this opportunity to learn. And then making that as a service to your colleagues, right?Because I'm sure that they're seeing how this is having an impact on students and how it's helping them to learn and retain. So, they definitely see the benefit, and now that's now opened up even the opportunity to teach them these concepts so they could start to think like, "Well, how could I use it in my curriculum for my students in an interesting way." Which is you're just becoming this real true advocate inside your college. Which is pretty cool.MA: I think also part of it was in terms of—I would say when someone's sketchnoting, I know this is actually a tip, but I'll just say it in advance, is feeding to your mind because when I was doing this quietly, I was reading a lot of books about innovation and sketch notes and various things.There was a book called—oh, have I written it on somewhere? I have it here. The book is called "Creative Confidence: Unleash the Creative Potential Within All of Us" by Tom Kelly and David Kelly. That book was pivotal for me as well, because they have an organization called, IDEO. I don't know if you've heard of it before.MR: Yes.MA: IDEO is responsible for promoting innovation, I guess is how to put it, by taking a multidisciplinary approach. That is what has encouraged me to collaborate with my colleagues because when we think about organizations and how we can benefit our organizations when we work together and share our different skills, we bring different perspectives as well, that is powerful.So that is one of the reasons why I'm sharing it with my colleagues because although sketchnoting is my skill, I'm learning so much from them and I hope they're learning from me as well.MR: I'm guessing, just judging by the little bit that I feel here, they're probably learning a lot from you. Which is great. I think that's so admirable for you to not keep it to yourself, but spread it further and offer it to your colleagues, which is great to hear. Well, let's shift…MA: I was gonna attribute that to you too because you have created a community of sharing. That is, for me, one of the things that drew me to sketch notes because it's such a friendly environment and people are very encouraging of one another.MR: Definitely, something that I saw in other communities that I was involved with. In the web design community, there was a very welcoming and open environment there, and I just wanted to model that.It seems to me like, because we modeled that early, that it drew other like-minded people, and we seemed to have built a community that's sort of sharing and open and helping each other all the way down. So, when new people come, the culture is just, hey, this is a space where we share and we teach each other and we help each other.I always say, there's so much opportunity to share this idea. There's no reason why we should be thinking that we're fighting over table scraps when there's so much opportunity for everyone to have a place at the table and do work and have an impact. There's just so much work to do.I'm glad that you've sensed that. It's definitely something intentional and I hope that it just continues throughout the community. So that's really great to hear. Thank you.MA: Thank You.MR: Yeah. Well, we all do it together, so that's great to hear. At this point, I would love to shift to something more practical, I guess. Not that the other stuff isn't practical, but the people on the podcast love hearing about tools and how people use their tools.So, let's shift into the tool discussion and let's shift in specifically to analog tools and then follow up if you use digital tools with what digital tools you use.MA: Okay. I would say use what you have, start with what you have. For example, well, I used to use A-4 sheets of paper because I sometimes destroy my work if it's not very good. Yeah, I have a habit of that. But I started with A4 sheets of paper and a pen although it was a refillable pen—you know the FriXion refillable black pen?MR: Mm-hmm.MA: Which it's kind of the best of both worlds. I always think of a pen as the tool that makes me fearless and the pencil that makes me cautious. But the FriXion pen is a pen, but I can rub it out. I'm kind of contradicting myself anyway.I started it with that one because if I'm in the class and I'm sketchnoting, sometimes I make spelling errors and that helps me to fix it really quickly. But lately, actually, I haven't used that as much, so maybe my confidence has grown. I like to use Muji. Have you heard of Muji pens?MR: Yes. Of course. It's a famous Japanese store, which I've been to the one in New York City, but I know it's worldwide as well.MA: I love Muji. The Knot 0.38 and the Knot 0.5, my absolute favorites. One of my colleagues introduced me to the Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pen.MR: Oh, yes.MA: You've heard that one.MR: Those are good as well. Yeah.MA: That one's amazing. And actually, just recently stumbled across—I didn't realize that you could get gray highlighter pens, so I used the Stabilo Boss highlighter in Gray. Well, I was using the Tombow markers, but they're quite expensive. So, I like to buy a box of the Stabilo Boss. They're really good.But paper-wise, I highly recommend dot grid paper because it makes my work look neat. Some people say, "Oh, Mawusi, how do you do such straight lines? Or, you know, that's so neat." I'm like, "If you zoom in, you will see the dots." It really helps a lot.In the classroom, I use a clipboard, which is quite handy. But also, if I'm doing a finished sketch note by hand, I use a transparent clipboard. That's a little tip. If you use a transparent clipboard and then you use one of the, you know the flat LED light boxes, you can trace your work. So, it's just really handy.MR: Interesting. So, you have a light source behind this clear clipboard, and then you can lay the rough sketch underneath and then do your finished on top of it. Am I understanding that right?MA: Yeah. And those things are very cheap to buy, but perfect for what I need. The dot grid paper that I absolutely love is Clairefontine paper. It just feels really, really nice.MR: It works well with those pens that you've mentioned. A question, for those who are dot grid connoisseurs, I know that there's different levels of dot grid. Like I know some have very light gray dots and some are darker.Where is the Clairefontaine fall on that spectrum? Is it relatively light dots so that it's, you know, kind of goes invisible at some point? Or are they a little bit darker?MA: I think it's kind of light because people don't really notice it. I kind of feel like I'm cheating 'cause I'm thinking, they think I'm really neat, but I'm not.MR: Well, I suppose if you're using the Stabilo Boss gray marker, I guess you could adjust your exposure, say in Photoshop or whatever your photo tool is, and increase the contrast. Those dots would probably drop away and you wouldn't even see them, right? So, that's probably another option as well.MA: Oh, actually another tip. I find when I was sketchnoting in the classroom, I was taking too long with preparing the page in advance. What I did was I had a template, the original was dot grid paper. And because I'm in the classroom, I just photocopied that page. And so, the dot grid was even less noticeable so when I scanned it, nobody knew. So, yeah.MR: Interesting.MA: That's another little tip.MR: Cool. That's pretty cool. We're getting free tips here. This is pretty great. Now, does the Clairefontine paper come in like a block, and then you tear off sheets as needed? Or is it bound in some way? How is that paper? How do you work with the paper?MA: It's in a block and then you tear it off. They say it comes in A4 and A5. I think that's the European size. But when you tear it off, it's slightly smaller.MR: Oh, I see. Because there's perforations on the edge probably.MA: Yeah. But I think they provide the paper for Rodeo Notebooks. Is it Rodeo?MR: Yes. Yes, exactly.MA: Yeah, I think they have that same paper, but basically, I like loose sheets because I can then arrange it in whichever way I want. And it's much easier to scan your work if it's not in a notebook.MR: Good point. If I'm not mistaken, I think Clairefontine and Rhoda are both French companies, so it would make sense that they would collaborate in some way. Maybe they're owned by the same parent company for all I know. I don't know. But I think Rhoda Notebooks work in a similar way where there's a—and maybe they calculate this, right.So actually, the part you tear off is maybe A4 and they add a little bit. So, when the perforation tears away and what's left in the notebook is a little bit taller than A4. You know what I mean? Like, when you tear out the sheet, it's exactly A4. I don't know if that's true, but I've used Rodeo paper—MA: No, it's smaller.MR: Is it? Okay. So, it is—MA: It's annoying that it's smaller, but I still like the paper. It's still like the paper, but it's smaller.MR: Got it. Okay. Good to know. Good to know for those who find that important, little tip again there. What about digital? Do you have digital tools that you use? Are you using an iPad or some other tool like that?MA: I've started using the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. The first sketch note I did with that was one of the guest speaker because I just wanted to take the sketch notes to a more, in my view, professional level.Because when I was having to trace it for a finished sketch note, I wanted to kind of take away some of those steps and do more of a rough sketch and then do the illustration. I use Concepts. Oh, my goodness, Concepts is so good.MR: It's a great tool. Yeah.MA: And Procreate, obviously. Yeah. Everyone uses it. I have to admit, I don't know how to use both of them really, really well, but I use them enough to get the finish that I would like. That's something to explore later. I have to admit, I prefer working on paper. I just love the feel of paper. That's my go-to.MR: Yeah. I think many sketchnoters will use a paper-like, or some of other similar matte screen protector, which sort of approximates the feel of paper. I mean, it's not exactly. I think paper-like, probably achieves it the best with the best clarity, but there are other screen protectors that also do the same. Which helps, but still, it's not quite ink on paper, it's closer.MA: It's good. But I have to say by going on the iPad, it makes me more of a perfectionist and I don't like that because at least when I sketchnote in the classroom, it feels hot off the press and I haven't had a chance to make it beautiful because my objective is to make meaningful notes that are useful. So, I think when I do my digital sketchnotes, I'm thinking too much about aesthetics. I'm trying to break away from doing that 'cause it's very tempting.MR: Yeah. It's almost as though paper and pen puts emphasis on the process. Because you have less control. Whereas when you go to an iPad or something, you end up inadvertently being maybe even more focused, a little bit more focused on the output. Because you have the ability to undo or to redo things or to change things, or to move things.Heedlessly, if you allowed yourself to, and there's something about the paper that, you know, maybe the friction of the paper in the sense of if you do it hot off the press, right. And even if you redid it, let's say you wanted to do it a little nicer, like if there's some friction there, right?You've gotta redraw all this stuff on another sheet on your clear clipboard with the light coming from behind and it's a little bit of friction. You wouldn't wanna do it a third time, right? So, you would probably stop at that point. Where with the iPad, it's very easy to just keep noodling and noodling and noodling and never finish. So, I could see the definite different feel for them.And, you know, I always think of the two, sort of provide different purposes. So, I often use the iPad for illustrations where, you know, it's gonna be printed or there is some final output that's important. But I found this recently on a project, just to point out this.I was doing the iPad with—I use paper and I was doing sketches and I had sort of built a little template for myself for this illustration project. And I found myself getting really rigid and I was resisting drawing and I was taking longer on each piece.And I got to the point where I said, wait a minute, I need to just change this up. So, I got the manuscript for the book project that I'm working on, and I just got my little pen and all I could fit were in the margins, little thumbnails along the edge of where the text was. So, it was very limited space.I just started doing these little thumbnails and started drawing concept. And it was amazing how much it freed me up to just think, "Oh, a little thumbnail, big deal. You know, that one didn't work. Draw another one. Oh, that didn't work. Draw another one. Boy like that. What if I do another one?"Next thing you know, every one of these ideas I was having to illustrate for you know, I was doing three or four different concepts or little variations, right? Suddenly the floodgates opened, and I was just like moving through the manuscript like crazy. And all it was, was this shift from, you know, sort of the rigidity or the perfectionism or something on the iPad back to paper and a pen with limited space.Again, coming back to limitations and embracing them just keeps proving itself as a really effective tool for, at least for me, freeing my mind to kind of focus on the content and really get into the process and stop worrying so much about the output. So, I definitely can resonate with what you're saying here.MA: I agree. I also would say that I find that as I've—I hope I go back to how I was before. When I started Sketchnoting and I didn't have anything to go by, any previous sketch notes, basically all I thought was, I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it.Now that I've been doing it, I'm starting to be more cautious. 'Cause I'm like, what's happening? Because I'm almost scared to do it because I feel that people expect it to be good. What if it's not good? So, I just need to just do it.MR: I think it would be interesting for you to actually ask someone to do some, you know, user-testing and ask them what do you expect out of it. And you probably would find that they would think like, whatever you're doing is amazing.They wouldn't care either way. They just love that you are thinking this way if you get to the core of it. I mean, the beauty of it is we often sort of find ourselves, like the story I told you about the illustration, I sort of boxed myself into this situation.It finally dawned on me like, “Wait a minute, I'm in charge of this project. Why am I feeling as though I have to follow some rigid template that I made? Like, I can change anytime I want to. I’m just going to grab the manuscript and a pen and forget the iPad. I'm not touching the iPad.” We have the opportunity to have you know, the ability to make those changes and to try and experiment and sort of work our way back.So that's really good news that if you ever find yourself bound and/or you've painted yourself in a corner, well, you know, your shoes might get some paint on them, but you can walk out of the corner and just start over again.That's always good news is you have the opportunity to shake it up and try some new things or go back to the thing that worked for you and start again and see, what did I learn from the other one and how can I apply this now knowing it, which is sounds like a little bit of where you're at as well.MA: Yeah. I wanna say one of my daily practices for sketch notes is that I sketch note sermons online. There's a church that does a daily devotional which is like 15 minutes long. I don't do it first thing in the morning, 'cause I'm not a morning person. I do it later on in the evening.I find that those sketch notes are more real because nobody sees them except me. Actually, I've moved from single sheets of paper to a notebook for that. So, I have a whole notebook full of them. What I like about them is they're just themselves. I have not tried to make anything beautiful. I just quickly got that information done. So yeah, even if you go digital, keep drawing by hand.MR: Maybe that's your first tip since we're now sort of heading into the tips department.MA: Oh yeah.MR: And I guess I should frame it. I always frame this. Probably regular listeners like you will have heard this a million times, but, you know, give us three tips that you would say to someone who feels stuck. Someone who feels they're on a plateau. Just these little inspirations to kind of break out of maybe a rut. And I think if you wanna go further in this, what you've talked about, you know, go back to drawing by hand. This could be your first tip, I think.MA: Okay. I have many tips, and it's hard to choose one to three, so might give a few more. Is that all right?MR: That's fine. Yeah, please.MA: Okay. First, one is don't overthink it. Just do it. Just do it. I tried to talk myself out of it when I was doing it at work, but I have to say when I did it, what a sigh of relief. I really enjoyed myself. Even though I was getting paid for it. I was like, "Wow, this is fun." So just do it. That's the first tip.If you can't do something, don't worry. Find another way. Be open to trying something different. And if you're struggling with your sketch note, listen to the podcast. Listen to the different interviews with different sketchnoters, find out how they're using it, and especially make note of their tips. What are they doing that? And just try it.Next one is share your work. I am not online at present, but I will be. So, share it at work. Share it with friends or even just sketch note in a diary or something. But yeah, share it with other people. Experiment especially with the layout of the sketch note. Find what works for you. Actually, this is way more than three. I'm gonna give you a few more.MR: Okay. Go for it.MA: Collaborate with your colleagues. That is golden. Collaborate with your colleagues 'cause then you get to make really meaningful connections with colleagues. I know working with people that I wouldn't have an opportunity to work with or our path and way not have crossed, but sketch notes has kind of opened the door for that. So, collaborate.Ask for feedback. Another golden one. Because that is how you're going to improve. If I had sketchnoted and sketchnoted and sketchnoted and nobody saw it, how could I improve? I might have improved, but maybe a lot slower. So definitely ask for feedback.Tell someone your goal. If this is something that you wanna start doing, share that with someone. Because what really helped me, what was so pivotal, was that teacher. He encouraged me because, you know, my very first sketch note, I have it in the classroom that I did it, it's not wonderful.I thought he was gonna laugh, but he just encouraged me. And that kind of helped me to be accountable because I've told people, this is something that I wanna do. So be intentional and tell people about it. If it's a New Year's resolution say, you're more likely to keep it if you've told people you're gonna do it.I'll give you a bonus tip. Don't give up. Be patient. Be patient because when you sketch note, say for example at work, people may not understand what you're doing at first, they might think it's a bit strange, they might wonder why you're doing it, they might actually tell you to stop doing it. Nobody told me to stop doing it. But just say somebody might, don't let that determine whether you do it or not. Keep going. Do not get discouraged. Just do it.MR: Well, those are fantastic tips. I'm glad that you added some additional ones because it seems to me like this is a great series of tips that you've shared with us and directly from your own experience.I can tie them all back to the story you told of how you began sketchnoting at work and, you know, with your students in mind. And next thing you know, you're collaborating with colleagues and sharing information with them and having an influence, right?This one little experiment led to influencing your whole college, it seems like, and probably leading in that direction, which is pretty cool. So, thank you so much for the tips and offering them to us.MA: Thank you.MR: This is the part where we typically ask where we can find you. And as we chatted just before we began recording, you're in the middle of developing probably a website and working out social media stuff. So, if you don't have anything yet, that's okay. We will put that in the show notes if it's available when we come to this.Maybe in lieu of doing that since we'll just do that in the show notes. If you're listening, just peek in the show notes, and if Mawusi's got some information, we'll put it in there for you so you can find her.I just wanted to let you know that I'm so impressed with your story and how you've just moved yourself forward with a servant attitude serving your students and how this led you to where you're going and you continue to serve. I think you just a really great example of our community.You really represent our community, and I'm really proud to have you as a representative where you are and so encouraged by your story. Thank you so much for taking time and spending time to share it with us. And I'm so excited to hear how this will influence the next person who hears it and all the influences you're gonna have in the place where you are. So, thank you so much, Mawusi.MA: Can I say a big thank you to you?MR: Sure.MA: You have encouraged me so much. You didn't know that I was listening to all of your episodes. You didn't know that I attended your workshop online. When I went to the sketchnote camp that was online, you could only see my illustration. I wasn't visible. I did all those things quietly and, you and your community has encouraged me so much, even when I was doing this by myself. So, thank you so much.MR: Well, thank you.MA: I'm forever grateful.MR: Well, it's an honor. It's an honor to serve, so thank you. Sounds like we're in a good place and we continue to have our influence. Sometimes it doesn't seem like you are, but you are having an influence. So, keep going. Just as Mawusi said in her tips, keep going.Well, this has been so much fun. It's been so enjoyable to talk with you and hear your stories, and I'm just excited to see where this all goes for you and how you're gonna fit into our community. For everyone who's listening to the podcast, this wraps another episode of "Sketchnote Army Podcast”. Until the next episode, this is Mike and Mawusi signing off for today. Talk to you soon.

In this episode, Ty Hatch, who started sketchnoting as a practice to pay attention and stay awake shares why he still loves the art and his work on creating headshot illustrations and creating sketchnotes for meetings and conferences.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 — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Ty Hatch?Origin StoryTy’s current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find TyOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.Ty's websiteTy on TwitterTy on InstagramTy on LinkedInTy on MastodonTy on PinterestTy on Artist Trading CardsTy On DribbleUX Week 2008 SketchnotesInktoberTy’s Son’s Pokémon DrawingsToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Mechanical pencilBallpoint Rotring 600 pencilKaweco fountain penPost-It-NotesGlobal Art Materials SketchbookMoleskine Art sketchbookSketchnote Idea bookPaper by WeTransferiPad ProApple pencilProcreate Adobe FrescoTipsEverybody is creative in their own way, and that's okay.Enjoy what you do. You can like a range of different things, and that's okay.Set boundaries for the things that are really important to you, in your life that are not work-related. Set those boundaries, talk about them, and live your life in a way that reflects your priorities. CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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, this is Mike, and I'm here with Ty Hatch. Ty, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.Ty Hatch: Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here.MR: Ty, we've known each other for years and years. We were talking about when we thought we connected, you had a pretty pinpoint accurate time-point.TH: Yeah. It's funny. Back in 2008, I went to a UX Week, which was a conference put on by, for those that remember Adaptive Path, I think they got purchased and became the in-house UX department for Capital One a few years ago. I was there and I was like, "I need to pay attention." Did some sketch notes, or just did notes, I wasn't thinking about it. Got an email from you after I posted them up on the OG photo-sharing Flickr, and you're like, "Hey, can I put these into my Sketch Note Army?" And so, we just stayed in touch throughout the years since then, so.MR: Yep. Well, that leads right into telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.TH: You bet. I am a UX manager for O.C. Tanner, which is an employee recognition company. I help create the space for employee recognition. I Work with a team. I have three people on my team. We're part of a larger experience group, and we focus on how can people feel appreciated at work by the employers. It's a really fun thing to do. I also, as you know, do sketch notes at times and random doodles and whatnot when the time allows. That's me. I enjoy UX design. It's a fun problem space to be in.MR: Well, I can relate to that as a UX principle, UX designer. I find it fascinating as well. I focus on software, but there are tons of opportunities to make things better, always, seems like. It's good to hear you're focusing on that, and that's such a critical space, especially now with all the challenges of hiring people and maintaining employees, and having them not leave by recognition. Huge, huge opportunities there, I would think.TH: Yeah. It's huge. You, like me, it's hard to feel sometimes like you're moving the needle and you're making a difference for people. One of the things that really gets me going is knowing that the work that I'm doing is actually helping people feel that appreciation, that they get that recognition from not only their peers, but from their leaders and whatnot.MR: Yep. Super important. It's something that often goes under the radar and managers might not think much about it, but is so critical. Often it doesn't cost you much other than time and a little bit of thoughtfulness. So, that's really cool. I would love to hear a little bit more about how you ended up in the space where you are both professionally, but also as a sketchnoter. Had you always drawn since you were a little kid? What's been your history? Let's start from when you're just a little guy.TH: I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up. I grew up in Southern Idaho and southeastern Washington. Miles outside of my small town. There wasn't much to do there. We were too far out to get TV reception. We often joked we got matching ants on our TV screen because this was back in the days before cable. We had terrible TV reception on our black and white TV. We did have indoor plumbing, and electricity, so that was always good.My brother and I, we would leave the house, go out in the backyard. We didn't have neighbors at the time, and so, we would just go out sometime after breakfast and typically we'd come back around dinnertime 'cause we were hungry. We would always have some sort of adventure and whatnot. I think at some point, a friend of ours introduced us to Dungeons and Dragons and I became a really big fantasy nut.This was the early days of D&D. I used to have a first edition, Monster Manual and Player CanBall and DMS Guide and all that. We colored them, I coloring books 'cause they were all just black and white illustrations. I loved it. Got into reading books and whatnot. Wanted to play football, but didn't seem to get enough interest for college people. We were in a small town, nobody really knows what's going on with a small town.I served a mission for my church for a couple years and then returned home. I was visiting my grandparent's house, and this is probably my favorite story about what got me into what I do today is there was this really awesome a couple of these burly looking pirates on it. I was like, "Well, this is cool, visual stimuli to get someone board at grandma and grandpa's house, right? It said the white family, I said, "Oh, that's a Piratey name."I was like, "Oh, let's read about these pirates." It wasn't pirates. It was a story about the artistic legacy of NC Wyatt and his son Andrew, and his grandson Jamie. I just got hooked and in fact, I have a self-portrait from that issue that I took out of the magazine. I think I found a couple copies over the years. But there was a really little self-portrait that he did that I have hanging on my wall.There was some painters tape. And I was like, "Oh, you get paid doing art? What? Completely radical concept for me. I'd always loved comic books. My brother and I collected comics over the years. I figured, I was like, "Oh, what can I do with art?" I started exploring the different art-related careers and I stumbled upon graphic design because as I learned about illustration as a career, I was like, "That's really competitive. I don't know that I'm good enough to compete there, but I can definitely think visually and solve problems." So, I tended toward that.That was about the time I was a junior at state school in Washington State where I'd met my wife and I applied for an art school in Portland and I'm like, "There's no way they'll let me in." But surprisingly, they did. I finished a BFA in graphic design. My senior capstone project there at the time was a website, this is what? 1998 I wanna say. Right about the time my oldest was born. And my senior project was an informational website on typography, which is still out there.I did a really quick redesign of it the next year 'cause it was a hideous thing when I got looking at it in reality. But it's still fitting there, 20-some-odd years later. It was an informational website about typography. Cause actually, I fell in love with typography in school. That's one of the things I absolutely loved. I was like, "Oh, could I make money doing typography?" I was like, "No, I can't." Type is another one of those professions, it's a very niche specialty.MR: Yeah. You can do it, but you have to really work at it.TH: Yeah. But I love design. I love the visual solving of problems and communicating clearly with design. For several years, I did that and slowly over time morphed into more of an interaction UX designer. Just as the industry changed, I'm like, "This is a good thing. This can provide for me and my family and I enjoy doing it." You slowly over the years gravitated into technology and doing UX.That was the thing that got me where I'm at. Particularly doing sketchnotes, like the sketch note that I did at UX Week was the first time that I actually shared anything that I'd done like that. I would do 'em in my sketchbooks 'cause it helped me process what was being communicated, presentations that I would go to.I really took off though, I wanna say about 2014, 2015 when I got my first iPad. There's this little app that was really cool. I'm like, "This is cool." I was trying to use it with my finger, but the company that made the app, which is Paper. The company at the time was called, FiftyThree.MR: FiftyThree. Yep.TH: I think I got one of their styluses, which looked like a carpenter's pencil. I was like, "This is cool." But I didn't like the drag of the rubber on it, but it made my finger drawings not as crappy. I'd used that stylus. I tried to play around with it a bit more. Then Apple introduced the pencil and it was a game changer for me.I've dabbled a bit with other applications, but the Paper is still my go-to when it comes to sketchiness because of how it works. I still maintain sketchbooks. I have one now. It's more random skulls and patterns and headshots. Like you see I participate in October each year, which is a drawing challenge. If you go over into my Instagram, you'll see that I have a few. I think I actually made it through all 31 days this year.MR: You did.TH: Which is like maybe the second or third time that I've done it. I've completed Inktober. But that's just fun. It's a good challenge to just do random headshots. I enjoy the personalities that come out of those headshots. That's a bit of how I got into it, what I've been doing.MR: Wow. And now, do you still do sketchnoting from time to time?TH: I do. I haven't had as much with the pandemic. Right before the pandemic, I was actually doing a fair amount of it. I was getting contacted by conferences to help with that. I did a Mind the Product conference and did a plural site live as well. They were a lot of fun. Did the thing with—what I like about—my particular process with sketchnotes is I prefer being in person at any one event 'cause processing that real-time is the thing that I did. I've tried to do it with different random, YouTube presentations and stuff like that, but I don't get quite the energy and the vibe off of a live event.MR: Interesting. When I look at your style, I see you have a very unique ink style, I dunno how to describe it, but it looks like you're using a brush pen or something. There is some single-line work, right, but there's some that looks like it's kind of thick and thin. What is the tool that you're using to achieve that? I assume you're still on Paper, right?TH: Yeah. Looking at the ink over stuff, I typically, I'll pencil it out, I'll sketch out in pencil and then I just use fine liners. I use a fine linear and then like a 0.8. Sometimes I'll go in with the smaller one. One little tool that I saw, a Kaweco.MR: Oh, yeah.TH: I was like, I put it in my cart and it's really hard to justify that experience. Not a cheap thing, hey. But it got low enough and I'm like, okay, it was my birthday. And I was like, I told my wife, "I'm gonna splurge and get this." And like, okay. I love it. I haven't done much drawing with it. I got an extra broad nib and it's a little too thick for me. My pen addiction, my writing instrument addiction is breathing and well, and I collect art supplies when I'm trying to figure out something I wanna do. I ordered a broad nib off of Jet pens, which is not a good site if you like ready instruments. It's not good for your wallet. It's a great size.MR: Great site, and yeah, you spend a lot of money there pretty easily.TH: Oh yeah.MR: Paper now is owned by, WeTransfer the file transfer company, and still is maintained and has had some updates. Like you, I use Procreate for illustration work, but if I'm doing sketch notes, I go right to Paper. At this point, it feels really natural, the tools, I'm very aware of them. When you do sketchnoting in Paper, what are the tools that you like to use there? I'm just curious about that. Looking at, just have one of your samples up here on my screen. Looks like you're—TH: I have an iPad Pro that I use with an Apple pencil. Typically, when I do it, I'll—what I love about Paper is the intuitiveness of the tools. They have a paintbrush, they have a ink pen or fountain pen. They have a couple different types of markers and a pencil. Typically, I like to do a little sketch of the presenter. And so, if you look at it, you'll see that most frequently. Then notes around the topics they're talking about.Often, I'll get the sketch of the presenter. I do that in the quiet moments of their presentation. I'll either use the ink pen, the fountain pen version, a medium nib. It's relatively inexpensive to pay for the pro version for Procreate or for the Paper.MR: Right. It's $12 a year, I think.TH: Yeah. I'm more than happy to pay that 'cause it's given me a lot of opportunities. The thing that I love is the color mixing. They've nailed color mixing like nobody else has, and I think it's one of the best things that they've done in software. I'll use that or I'll use a one the fine liner to do the block letters and whatnot.Every now and then, I have little people pop up that are just a head body and arms, legs to sometimes self-characters and concepts that the designers are doing. Because the thing that I found really interesting with sketch notes is that it's that real-time synthesizing of the concepts that they're presenting that I get the most out of 'em. Largely, it started as a selfish practice to pay attention and stay awake, but I found that I still love doing that because it really helps me to get something outta these presentations as well. But yeah, Paper is hands down the most intuitive tool, I think, for just sketching out in general. I love it.MR: I agree. Well, we're talking a little bit about Sketchnoting specifically. We've done who you are and what you do. We got your story of your origin. Tell us a little bit about something you're working on now, whether it's work or personal that you're excited about that you can share with us.TH: Well, let's see. One of the things I'm really excited about, I have no clue how to do it, is I want to try and figure out how I can work a little bit more in conversational device. Conversational device seem to be taken a lot. There's the ChatGPT bot that everybody's talking about. All these AI-based tools, which have their place, I think. But how can I build a conversational way to present my work or to present myself?I've done some really terrible things. Experiments that will never see the light of day. One of the things I love about design is that's experimentation is part of trying to figure out a solution. You and I both know as designers, it's like, you can't really come up with a good solution unless you know what the problem is. And so, trying to figure that out from my perspective, like, okay, how can I make something like this happen and in a way that I can somehow manage, right?I will fully admit to being an old school. It's like my personal psych is there. I think I got a redesign out last year that I'm really happy with. That was the seven-year cycle of refreshing a personal site. It seems like seven to eight years is about the time it takes for me to get around to saying, "I should probably redesign my personal site." And actually, finding the time to do it.I want to, being able to maintain that in a way because with all the different social media things, it's really hard to improvise where your content is in a good way. 'Cause if you post on social media, you don't have a real centralized location for any of the content that you can put out. You have to say, "I'm gonna focus on this platform."That's really the dangerous thing, I think. How do you position yourself not only as a working professional, a design professional like we're as an artist you know, and give yourself a home where people know, "Oh, if I go here, I'll be able to find and go look at all the other things."'Cause as much as I love social media and Instagram, I'm tired of seeing an ad every third post in Instagram as I scroll through my feed. Then you have other social media services that kinda self-destruct. I want to have a good centralized location, and I haven't been able to get that fully done yet.'Cause as much as everybody loves WordPress and it powers so many sites, you have to really want to put in that time and effort to make WordPress work. There's other platforms and stuff too, but it's like, how can you make your content your own and have it in a place that everybody can know, "Okay, if I go here, I'll find their stuff." I'm trying to figure that out for myself.MR: That's something that challenged me as well. Years ago, I decided to go to Squarespace just because I could build what I wanted and not think too much about it, and constrained me a lot. Paper does provide, and it's grown to meet my needs over time. That's been really good to secure as well. I had an instance where I ran websites on WordPress and didn't update, and someone was running a legal pharmaceutical site buried in my website, and I was like, "All right. Not doing that anymore."I was out on WordPress self-hosting and switched to Squarespace, and it's been a good experience. But yeah, I felt the same way you talk about, you know, scrolling through Instagram, it feels like more and more of its ads and less and less of its actual content. I have to really fight through the ads to actually get to my friends for interesting things, and that's frustrating. Someone's going to hopefully solve that problem soon.TH: There's a lot of different platforms out there, you know, Mastodon is taking off, but it's like, in my mind, it's a little too complex for the normal person. Just about everything, you have to feed the algorithm. You have to continually be putting stuff out there to maintain any audience. People have lives outside of posting on social media.One thing I think in general that people don't think about too much is I have a life that is very important to me with my family, and it's like, I'm not gonna be posting all the time for these different platforms. It's great. I love doing it, but it's like, that's not my primary, one of my key focuses.MR: That's the question everybody has to ask, right, to what am I gonna feed this thing? What are its expectations of me? 'Cause sometimes you come to realize that these platforms have expectations for what they want you to do that doesn't align with what you wanna do. You have to make that decision because you only get so much time. It keeps going away. That's really fascinating. Well, I hope that redesigning your website goes well. I know what that feels like. I haven't done it for a while, so I know what a challenge it is.TH: I appreciate that. One thing I'm really interested in trying out, and maybe I'll be doing it a little bit this week a bit if I can, is AWS has this thing called Amplify Studio where they've pre-built some components and whatnot, in React powered by a Figma template. And so, you change your components in the Figma template, connect your account, and you should be able to launch out some app or whatever.I have the template, it's been taunting and mocking me for several months since I discovered it. An inanimate software can't do that. AI might be able to do that, but inanimate software doesn't necessarily do that as you're constant saying, "Hey, you got this, are you gonna do something at some point?"MR: For those who don't know, Figma is a design tool, vector-based design tool where many designers build often their prototypes and their mockups with. What Ty's talking about is he would build a mockup of his site and then use React, which is kind of a backend technology, I think is a fair way to describe it populated by—TH: It's a JavaScript framework—MR: Framework, that's the word I was looking for.TH: Yeah. Just help build out components. AWS is Amazon Web Services, which is the—basically simple way of looking at it is they provide a lot of the Cloud hosting services for a lot of providers. When your services aren't working, there might be an AWS outage somewhere causing some of that stuff. When the internet services go down, sometimes there's outage with some of these cloud providers—MR: Well later in the show, we'll definitely have a link to your website. Maybe by the time this episode launches, you'll have a new site up there that people can look at.TH: It gives me a goal to work on.MR: There you go. There you go. Let's take a little shift now and talk about tools. We've hinted at some, you talked about Paper by WeTransfer as a digital tool. Let's jump back into analog, and more specifically, are there brands of pens that you like, brands of paper, notebooks, pencils, so that people who are listening can dig them up and maybe experiment a little bit?TH: Absolutely. Right now, if I look at my desk, I have a mechanical pencil, and I'll send you some links so you can put these in show notes. It's a mechanical pencil, 0.51 with a metal coral is by Uni. The nice thing is, when you have a metal pencil, you'll often have this little nib that kinda gets bent and breaks. But what's nice about this pencil is that it retracts. It's fairly affordable. I think it's like maybe about 15 bucks. It's not a polymer is on the back of it.I also love fine liners. I've gotten the rounds with a whole bunch, I have some, Copics. The current one that I'm using is a Uni pen fine liner. I've found that I really like these really good waterproof so I can lay down watercolor washes or alcohol on so on. I got this one earlier this year. We did a team offsite. We got a rotating 600.MR: Those beautiful pens.TH: It was a Ballpoint. I'm not such a huge fan of ballpoint pens. But I discovered that Kaweco makes a gel pin insert refill, and so, I got a Kaweco gel pen insert in there. Then have a Kaweco fountain little porch fountain pen. The thing that amazes me-- yeah, it's tinier than I thought it was, but the thing I love about it is that the ink just flows and it's beautiful. It's really great.As far as what do I draw on, in the day, it's often post notes, making lists, and whatnot. I have sketchbooks. Right now, I'm using one. I've been experimenting a little bit with what I want to use for sketchbooks and stuff. This one's by a company, Global Art materials. It's just a generic kinda sketchbook.For years and years, I've used Moleskin's Art sketchbooks, which are great. I love that size. I got a eight by eight, or seven and a half by seven and a half watercolor sketchbook. I found that that was a little too precious. I was like, "Oh, I gotta do art in this stuff." I got the Kickstarter for "The Sketchnote Idea Book."MR: Thank you.TH: I love it, Mike. It's fantastic. The pages are bright white, which I absolutely love and they held all sorts of things. I got some watercolor in my old one. I have one somewhere, an Emergency Kit in case I have to go somewhere. I have another one somewhere that I'm like, lemme experiment with this stuff, and then maybe I'll get back to the Idea book. I found that that notebook that you guys put together was really one of my favorites in recent years.MR: Great.TH: The quality of the paper and the whiteness and the thickness made it really, really flexible. The only thing for me is maybe it was a hair too big, a little too wide. I like a little bit smaller, but I absolutely love the paper quality you guys did on that. Then like sketch notes or not sketch notes, but on the Ink Tobra drawings, I found a five by seven Strathmore 400 pad of paper that's really thick that I absolutely love.All of the years, and 2021s, I only did like 16 of them. I have all those originals hanging out on a piece of paper somewhere. One my goals with my personal site is to be able to set up a way to sell some of these 'cause that's fun or good if this is just sitting and collecting dust in your house. If you do it, I think that one of the real choices of making art is sharing it with people and helping them appreciate it. One of the things I wanna get going as well.MR: That sounds good. As far as digital, you talked about, of course, Paper. We got into that a little bit already. Are there any other tools that you like to play with? Or is that your go-to for pretty much everything?TH: I do have Procreate on my iPad. My kids use it a lot more than I do. One thing I found is I don't like the glossy slide of the Apple pencil on just a make a screen so I have a textured screen protector on it to give it that textural fill of paper. I found that that makes a huge difference for making marks on iPad. That's really it. I've toyed with, Adobe Fresco, Concepts app. There's one that the Icon Factory does, I can't remember it's Ben's go-to tool.MR: I think Ben Crothers likes that—Ben Norris likes that one.TH: Norris, yeah. I dabbled that a little bit. What I like about Paper is the ability to go from pencil to ink to watercolor. The brush that they have in Paper is fantastic. How you can lay your color, make it deeper and rich if you want.I haven't been able to get Procreate to do that. Procreate's a fantastic tool. I love it. But for Sketch notes, to me, it feels like it's a little too powerful. What I love about Paper is Paper's really good at just capturing your flow of thinking, whereas you have to be a lot more deliberate in your usage of Procreate. Although, if you're a Concept artist or somebody that's doing stuff like that, then absolutely that's a great place.My son does a lot of—he loves Pokemon, he loves Mario. He's been doing it. He's gonna be turning 25 this next year. And I'm like, "Dude, you could do commissions of people’s Pokemon on teams." He does this fantastic stuff. I'll send you a link to his Pokemon stuff. He'll do characters and whatnot. He's drawn so many Mario things. He's drawn hundreds of Pokemon and he gets them scaled. I just absolutely love looking at his stuff. I'm like, "Dude, you could probably do something with this. "But he's like, "Yeah, I know Dad, but I do this for fun." Which is great.MR: That sounds like a great variety of tools. You had quite a span. Some that I hadn't thought about, especially the Kaweco. I think it was the Kaweco insert that goes into the Rotring, I think you talked about. 'Cause I'm not a ballpoint fan either. There's a Schaffer insert that I use in my Retro 51s that I really like too. Probably a similar insert, I suppose.TH: I really like the Kaweco one. There's another one that seems to get pretty good reviews that I've seen on, I wanna call it Otto.MR: Oh yeah. Otto. I've had otto. Yeah, those are great. That's Japanese, I think.TH: Mark-making on a budget is a big deal for me. It's not necessarily the tools that make the person, it's what you do with the tools that you have. I think having a widely available set of tools is really important, but also making sure that they're budget-friendly, right?MR: Mm-hmm.TH: Is an important thing too.MR: Yep. I totally agree. Let's make one last shift into tips. The way I frame this is to imagine someone's listening. Maybe they're kind of at a plateau, or they just need some inspiration, little inspiration, little boost. What'd be three tips you would give that person to encourage them in their sketchnoting or visual thinking or just thinking, doing visual work experience.TH: The first tip, and I think this is a pretty important one. I've had a lot of people, when they find out I'm a designer, they throw, "Oh, I'm not artistic." And to me, it's not about being artistic. It's about being creative. I like to tell people everyone's creative in their own way. How you express your creativity is going to be different than how I express my creativity.My creativity comes out in the form of sketch notes and these random headshot illustrations that I do. Your creativity may be that you are a fantastic accountant and you can come up with really great ways to make things better and more efficient. Other people may just be fantastic books or bakers. Everybody expresses their creativity differently.It's not about being artistic, it's about expressing yourself in the work that you do. I think it's perfectly okay to admire for somebody's work and say, "Oh, that's fantastic," and be a fan of it, but also not beat yourself up like, "Oh, I'm not that good at because I can't draw like my sorority and illustrate all these school books." I can draw my own thing and I can be happy with it. And so, I think my first one would be, everybody is creative in their own way, and that's okay.With that, it goes to what I would say is my second tip is enjoy what you do. That it's really hard, I think, especially today for people to feel like, oh, I can enjoy this. I think you need to give yourself permission to enjoy those things that you find pleasing. There's so many things out there today, it's easy to get overwhelmed with them.I think it's okay to be nerdy and geeky or really into sports or, you can like a range of different things. If my kids were tell you what I like, they'd rattle off a list of dozens of things 'cause I don't think it's good to limit yourself to liking just one thing. You can like a range of different things, and that's okay. That would be my second one.The third one is, there's a script quote from Iron Glass. You've probably heard this. You can find a YouTube video on it somewhere, but he's talking about the work that you want to do when you—everybody has a particular taste and style in their head that they imagine. But then when you try and do it, it doesn't meet those mental expectations, but you can get there by working at it.I really think that everybody's capable of doing really great stuff, but you need to work to get to that point. Don't give up, but that's the whole—and I think follow your passion is really bad advice, but I think do what you enjoy because it may be that you may not enjoy your job which is providing for you and maybe your family. But if there's something outside of that that brings you joy and that you enjoy doing, do that in a way that helps you be happy.Over time, what you do with that will match what you see in your head. There may be opportunities that come up as a result of doing that because you never know. Opportunity—I forget who said this quote. Opportunity is often masked as hard work. If you're not doing the work to prepare for the thing that you want to do when that opportunity comes, you're gonna be ill-prepared to do that, that you want to do.And so, it's important to do the things that you feel are important that you love and you'll have an opportunity at some point. Timing is really important. I'll do a fourth one because this one I feel—and I've mentioned a little bit. You need set boundaries for yourself on what you do. You need to be able to say, this is what's important to me, and these other things aren't so important.And so, when it comes down to it, you know, I won't be doing this, this, or this because it conflicts with my more important thing. For me, personally, my most important thing is my family, and everything that I do, I do—I love design. I find that an extremely fulfilling, rewarding career, but it's a means to be able to provide for the family and make sure that they're taken care of.I think that a lot of people are like, this is my hustle. This is my thing. If you put so much of yourself into that, that you identify that with that, and if that thing goes away, where are you left? Set the boundaries for the things that are really important to you in your life that are not work-related. Because I can guarantee you everybody has something that's very important to them, that it's not work-related.Set those boundaries, talk about those boundaries, and live your life in a way that reflects your priorities because as you do that, people will see that, they'll understand that, they'll respect that. And as you do those things and you express yourself through whatever creative means you have, you'll gain those opportunities to be able to do those things and then lead a more fulfilling life and that you're you're happy with. You won't be living with regrets if you do those things.MR: I love the fourth tip. That's really great. Really encouraging. Well, thank you for all those tips and we appreciate your wisdom for all of us here. It seems like just minutes and suddenly we're near the end of the show. I'd love to hear where's the best place for people to find you? Websites, social media, whatever you think would be the best place to start and connect.TH: You bet. I do have a personal site as we were talking about. It's at tyhatch.com. That's gonna be where you can find me. I have links off to all my socials. I'm on Twitter for however long that's still up. I'm on Instagram. You can find me at both of those. Most social media, you can find me at Ty Hatch. Instagram, Twitter, those have been my mainstays. I do have a profile on Mastodon as well. You can find me there tyhatch@mastodon.online. And then also most of my schedule archive of at this point in time lives over on Pinterest. You go to pinterest.com/tyhatch.com/sketchnotes. I think I have a collection of about 300 different sketch notes that I've done.MR: Oh, that's great.TH: You can find me there. I'm always happy to field any questions. If you see something you like, send me a note. Say, "Hey Ty, I really like this sketch. Do you have it?" And if it's something from October, happy to do that. I did a thing years ago, oh gosh, it's been almost 10 years. Really, Mike, I'm getting old. I did this thing about 10 years ago called Artist Trading Cards, or ATC. I think it might still be up if you go to apcs.tyhatch.I did a bunch of Artist Trading Cards. It started off ostensibly as like, "I'm gonna do a little Christmas present for coworkers." And it turned into a four-month project that I had a daily post of thumb little sketch that I did. I'm happy to sell these or trade with you if you want to trade physical objects. There's a whole range of those out there as well. It's fun. I enjoy doing random doodles and I think some point, there will be an opportunity for 'em, but until then I get to enjoy them.TH: Yep.MR: Cool. Well, we'll definitely get show notes put into the episode. So if you're anything in or any of these things pique your interest, you can go check it out. We have links to it. And thanks so much, Ty for being on the show. I'm so appreciate the work you do and the representation you put into the world and your leadership really need people like you doing that. And I'm so glad that you do it.TH: Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. It's been fantastic talking with you today.MR: You too. Well, and for everyone listening, that'll wrap another episode of "The Sketchnote Army Podcast." Till the next episode, this is Mike. Talk to you soon. All right. I'm gonna stop my recording.

In this episode, Julia Knyupa shares her visual thinking journey, the war in Ukraine and her journey fleeing war, and how she came to be where she is now. She also shares how the sketchnote community came through for her in her time of need.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’ infinite canvas lets you sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea, or keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most.The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Julia?Origin StoryJulia’s current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find JuliaOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.Julia's websiteJulia on instagramJulia on LinkedInJulia on FacebookYoutube TEDx Talk in UkrainianNatalia TalkowskaThe Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note-Taking by Mike RohdeToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. iPad ProNeuland Marker pensA4 Printer papersProcreateCanvaToonlyDoodlyTipsFake it till you make it. Work-life balance. Just continue learning every day, getting inspiration from everywhere, from your colleagues, traveling, and following people from different industries.Authenticity is the most important value nowadays so allow yourself to be yourself and be very kind o yourself. CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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 my friend Julia Knyupa. Did I say that right, Julia?Julia Knyupa: Yeah. More or less. Everyone, even in Ukraine struggle with pronunciation of it, so it's fine.MR: You mentioned that it's even an unusual name in Ukrainian, so maybe you can give it a little tidbit in that, in your origin story, but before we get to that, let's first say, Julia, who are you and what do you do?JK: Yeah. Hello, everyone. Hello, Mike. I'm very happy to be here with you today. My name is Julia Knyupa. I'm 32. I'm Ukrainian, and last year I felt like I became even more Ukrainian. I speak to you from the United Kingdom where I temporarily based, and we'll see where life will bring me next. Originally I'm from Ukraine. I'm a visual practitioner, sketch noter, graphic facilitator, whatever you call it. I help to translate ideas into visual language.MR: An interesting question would be, I know that you use digital tools. Do you also use analog tools like large boards and markers and such? What does your practice look like when you do that work?JK: Actually, I need really to come back in time to talk about this because mostly it happened in Ukraine and before COVID, and of course, before the war. I worked as a graphic recorder on event. Mostly they were conferences and sometimes strategic sessions in organizations. Little and big, no matter. Mostly I worked being most attentive listener in the room and trying to keep all the ideas put on the paper, or like phone board. This is another type of paper I use.This was since 2017, I started my journey in my native town, Turka, and then moved to the Capital of Ukraine, Kyiv. I spent wonderful few years doing this to different conferences and I never, never put any efforts to promoting myself. I still don't have a proper website. It was always word of mouth sharing information in my contact. This is in short.MR: Interesting. Well, I've always believed that word of mouth is always the best kind of advertisement even better than having to send someone to a website. But of course, websites do provide good information and are valuable as well if you wanna branch out.It sounds like you started in the analog space in Ukraine, and now that you're in the UK, are you still doing analog practice? Do you, like many practitioners see a shift towards digital for a variety of reasons? Is that true for you as well?JK: Last year brought me one chance to do analog graphic recording. It was in Moldova in October, two days of educational forum. Mostly, I do now digital sketchnoting and graphic recording. As I still mostly work with clients from Ukraine and sometimes from other countries. But mostly it's very, very convenient for all of us and cheaper for organizers of events. Of course, it kills the magic of being present in the room with other people, but if they're all also are present digitally, so it has no sense.MR: Then the last question I have around this is, have you experienced the case where you're doing your work on the iPad, and then it is being projected on a screen to the side? Is that something you've experienced yourself?JK: Yeah, I tried it with a few organizers, but we found out that it not focuses people, but distracts them. Now I offer organizers both options, but after explanation, most of them come to idea of having it afterwards. Sending participants via email or somehow else. Because if you want to see a person who is talking to you when it's digital because it's so many distractions and it's better to be focused on people, not on drawing. In analog world, I would say the opposite.MR: I wonder too, if it's with the analog world, because you're in the front and the scale is smaller for someone, say in the back. They see someone's doing something, maybe they catch a tidbit here and there, but if you're far enough in the back, you can't really read anything and you're not tempted to. So, you know it's happening, but your focus and attention is on the speaker.Whereas with digital, a lot of times you might have a pretty large screen, and then if you're like me, I'm zooming in to do work. And they're probably seeing this zoom-in and the zoom-out. It can be very distracting in that regard where you can actually sort of see a little more. It almost draws you towards that in a way that analog maybe wouldn't.I'm just asking these questions because as this transition is happening and I encounter graphical recorders, I'm curious to see their experiences 'cause everyone seems to have a little bit different one, and it's really great to hear your perspective on that.Let's shift into, I wanna hear your origin story. How did you become the Julia that we know? That we see your work and you're doing this work, right? You didn't just come out of kindergarten and suddenly you were a graphic facilitator. You had to build up and probably experience a lot of things. Tell us your story from when you were a little girl, what are some of the key moments that directed you to the place where you are?JK: It's a very nice question. Bringing me back in my memories. You said about kindergarten. I never was in kindergarten. I spent my childhood with my granny. It was very calm and nice, and she was very, very nice and creative person. I remember she spent a lot of time with me playing, showing me how to find a way in the forest. Drawing as well as her dream was to become a painter like an artist.Unfortunately, she didn't have this chance in her life. I feel when I'm drawing now that I'm kinda a little bit helping her to fulfill her dream. I had a pretty basic childhood, very common for post-Soviet countries. Nothing really special. And it was pretty boring by the time I became a student.My first degree is in publishing and editing. As when I was a kid, I liked to read books so much. My dream was to create books and to help people to get really interesting and important information in a nice way. I liked to write things, so I was really happy to play with wording, with editing.Of course, when it comes to English, I'm not so good at explanations, but in my native languages, I'm much better. Believe me, just believe me. Also, when I became a student, I found out that there is not much happening in my little hometown. So I started to look for opportunities to grow and to travel as well as my family didn't have a lot of money, so I never left my hometown till the time I was 17, 18.I started to apply for different trainings, projects, and conferences, and that's how I discovered that a lot of youth is participating in something like non-formal civic education. And I was really, really excited about this. That's how I decided, like deeply in my heart that I want to become a facilitator, a trainer, and not to be only a participant of this, but also to guide other people.By the time I finished the uni, I already was a facilitator in youth programs. I'm really, really grateful for this education through Theodore Hoch College. This is a German program. Also, a nice and interesting part of this story is that I was a journalist, a TV presenter, and in newspaper when I was a student.It was a very fun experience for me. Also, my granny was very proud that she can turn on TV and see me on the screen. This was something exciting about this. It also taught me that people really like when information is set up nicely and that time is money. Because on TV you suddenly realize that one minute is very expensive, so you start to put words in short which is also a very useful skill to what I do now.Seven years of facilitation of youth projects gave me a lot of nice opportunities to learn about people, diversity, social projects. It gave me a chance to travel a little bit around the world, not like the world, around eastern Europe, let's say. It was a very great experience when I started to think that the world is something much more interesting than my little hometown.MR: This reminds me a little bit of a interviewee we had last season with Natalia Talkowska who grew up in Poland, in post-Soviet Poland, really similar experience where she was just really hungry to see the world and to get out. Probably a little bit of a similar personality. We'll make sure and put a link in the show notes. If you wanna connect to between Julia and Natalia, you can listen to both of those interviews. Anyway, continue. Please continue.JK: Yeah. Cool. This brought me to the moment of my life when I was practicing, doing seminars with young people. And I saw that my colleagues, especially from Germany, are using wonderful skills, drawing while explaining something. And I was really excited. I never saw anything like this. It was a totally a new world for me, but I thought that it's absolutely impossible to learn how to do this as I never draw before I was 25.It was just kind of a dream, but I never even tried because I didn't believe that it's possible for me. But in 2016, it was my birthday and I was very lonely that day, so I decided to scroll Facebook and I saw that there is a training in Kyiv, in the capital of my city on visual storytelling.It takes three hours to get to Kyiv from my city. So I bought myself a ticket and went to this training and I was so excited. It was the best birthday present I could give to myself. I tried that basically I can do this and I can use it on trainings. I started to put it in practice.At the end of the year, I created my first big visual recording. And participants were excited because in Ukraine that time there was only one person who did this professionally. No one was really acquainted with this kind of, I would say, social art. That was amazing. It gave me an inspiration and gave me confidence that I'm able to do this.I decided from the first day that it's a very difficult thing to do, it's not like hobby so I need to do this for money. So I set up a tiny, tiny price for it, but for me, just to know that I'm doing this to grow and to be a professional and not just to play with it. I took it very seriously. But I didn't get any support from my ex-partner. He saw my first picture, and he said, "Oh, such a shame. I don't think that anyone will pay you for this."MR: Wow.JK: That made me so angry. To be honest, anger is a power which really can bring you very far. So I decided to prove--MR: Him wrong.JK: That he's wrong. Yeah.MR: Good for you.JK: I decided to create visual notes. Now, I do visual notes digitally and if needed offline. I do explainer videos, and animated stories, and I also teach sketchnoting people in Ukraine in the Ukrainian language. For few years, I think few hundreds of people learned it with me. And I always recommend them your books, Mike.MR: Wow, that's great. My book is in Ukrainian, by the way. I think you know this, right?JK: Yeah, yeah. Of course.MR: I don't know how well it's selling. I haven't gotten a report on it, but anyway.JK: I'm sure I was a great promoter of your book, Mike.MR: Thank you.JK: Half of books in Ukrainian are sold because of me--MR: Right. I like it.JK: Lobbying.JK: You may not be wrong, actually. Well, we'd have to see. Along this story, I dunno where this fits in, but we met each other in Portugal when we went to the International Sketchnote Camp. That's when I remember first meeting you and chatting with you really briefly, because a lot of people were talking and stuff. But it was really fun.And I thought that sort of brought full circle for me, knowing that the book had been translated into Ukrainian and I have copies here. Honestly, I'm pretty aware of the world, but Ukraine was sort of a blind spot for me. I just never thought of it separately from Russia simply because when I grew up, they were kind of the same thing, right?MR: That's probably my own blind spot. I was really excited when I learned that there was this, well, there's really like a separate language. Then as the more I learned, like actually this culture is really old, it's a really old culture, and it's this whole different experience. That was kind of my first awareness that. Of course, then I met Yuri Malichenko, who I learned as Ukrainian as well.Then suddenly like all these Ukrainians started popping up in my experience, like you and I think there's some others that I've met. It was kind of a fun awakening for me. Like, wow, there's this whole country. I was not aware of it, and now it is and there's these really cool people.My book is in this language. It was a fun way to be introduced to a country in a really positive way. Anyway, that's somewhere in this story, we met each other, I think that was 2018 in Portugal where we met.JK: Yeah, I think so. This was my first time ever I met visual community.MR: Really?JK: Yeah. Because Ukraine is really, really far from what is happening in Central and Western Europe. Yeah. I felt like I'm really the first person who came from so far to sketch note camp. I was excited. And I remember it was very expensive for me. This was my first time I asked the community for support. I said, "I can volunteer, I can do something there. So please just give me a chance to come. I will be really, really excited to see all of you."Because on the time, I only could follow people on Instagram, and it was unbelievable to see all them offline. That was great. When I saw you, I even didn't have words. I was so scared to approach you, and I was so happy then when you approached me. Like, "Oh my gosh."MR: That's funny. I remember you being very quiet and then we were chatting, I think it was after a session, I don't know which session, maybe it was Michael Clayton's session potentially or something. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I remember we had a good discussion. There are so many people in those camps. You're sort of lucky if you get maybe 30 minutes with somebody unless you intentionally spend time together. So yeah, it was really great to meet you there.JK: Yeah, that's for sure.MR: Well, that's really interesting. Go ahead.JK: Coming back to what you said before about Ukraine and the Ukrainian language, I also had a feeling and in my childhood, it was a very common narrative that Ukraine is a part of brotherhood, of big brotherhood. Also, my family has some roots, or not roots, but history is connected with Russia. My granny and my mom were born in Siberia, which is very far and it's a very cold place.But life circumstances brought them to Ukraine so I was born there, but I always knew a lot of facts about Russia, and Russian culture. We spoke Russian in our family, and even my school studies were in Russian. I grew up on a lot of very propaganda narratives, let's say.It's a very common story, unfortunately, for a lot of citizens of my country, but the good thing, which is happening now, we are finally becoming very, very independent. The freedom of thinking, the freedom of expressing your culture. I would say that being Ukrainian is not about your origin, but about what you feel yourself, about your soul, about your values, and how you identify yourself.Even it came out that I don't have any Russian origin, I'm Jewish, which is another funny story. I feel so much Ukrainian these days. I feel like I'm so much with my country and it is in my heart every day, and it made me even more Ukrainian these days.MR: I can imagine. I can't even imagine what that would be like. It's not even in my ability to imagine what it would be like. I'm so glad that you made it safely. Now, I guess, it's somewhere in this origin story. I'd love for you to tell what happened when you were there and how you got to the UK and all that stuff. It's really important for us to hear.JK: In Feb, on February 24th 2022, like a lot of people in my country, I woke up from explosions and sirens in my city. And the first thing I did, I thought this is a siren of ambulance because I was sleepy and I didn't realize what is going on. And I thought that all the explosions are also happened in my night dream. I didn't take it serious, even I was very worried before.I was anxious. Few months before the war happened, I kinda had a feeling that something gonna happen. The first thing I did, I opened the chat with my friends and then saw a message, "Oh my God, girls, the war has started. I remember that I had a very, very clear thinking, and I managed to do it very quickly.I mean, I realized that I cannot stay there because I'm--in short, I have some mental disorder, which is anxiety and I couldn't stay there because I knew that, unfortunately, I couldn't manage to--MR: Yeah, too much.JK: --be productive, and yeah. So I decided to move from Ukraine the same day.JK: Wow.JK: It was a long journey as I live in the very center of Ukraine. By the way, I think that a lot of listeners even don't realize how big is our country. It's the biggest country in Europe. I don't remember if it's bigger than France or France is bigger, but we are kind of the same size. It's a huge country. It took me one day to get to the border and I spent two days on the border.It was 36 hours in the car with my friend. My friend helped me to escape. She was driving. I spent one month in Poland. And it is an amazing country. Thank you all Polish people who are listening to this now. You are really great and your support of Ukraine is priceless and what you need to help our country is amazing. Not to underestimate the help of other countries, just we could really feel that this is a real friend now to us.Later when the United Kingdom started a governmental program which allowed Ukrainians to come because early it was very, very difficult to get visa to the UK for us. It's really an amazing chance to start your life somewhere in safe place with all the support provided from this country.So they offered local people to host Ukrainians. It is an amazing thing. And all last year was about feeling how world is supporting. A wonderful family in the UK offered to host me. So I still there. I still here. I'm very, very grateful to this amazing family who has eight children in total.MR: Wow.JK: They call me the ninth kid, and I really can feel it. I can tell this. And all other people who I met here, also very supportive and amazing. I even met here an amazing partner, like the best person I ever met in the whole life. Andy, I know you're listening and watching this. This is an amazing journey even it sounds horrible because of all this difficult circumstances like millions of people had to go through.Some of us really suddenly could feel that our dreams came true. A lot of us wanted to travel, and we got this. A lot of us wanted to try something new. We have all this, but unfortunately not in the way we usually plan to have this. It took me half of a year to feel where I am, what is going on in general, to find out myself standing steadily on the ground.And yeah, I started to look for chances to continue what I was doing, because I remember that it's such an amazing thing when you do what you love, it supports you. I don't want to share it as a long story, but what I was doing in Ukraine, like visual facilitation, et cetera, it's helped me to overcome depression. Of course, combined with the help of specialists, but it is an amazing thing.If you can do what you love, it really helps you to be focused on your goals and your dreams. That's how I found out that, oh, my old iPad is not working anymore like it's used to. I dunno how to say this in English. So I cleaned it from the dust, and I found out, oh my gosh, it works only like 30 minutes even being plugged in. I cannot provide quality services to my clients anymore.Unfortunately, it was not so popular last year in Ukraine to have visual facilitation as not so many conference has happened. So I had to start looking for new clients. It was a very stressful moment. However, one day I decided, oh my gosh, why I am struggling so hard trying to earn really little money if I can ask people to help me, because I remembered that if you ask, you have a chance to get it. If you don't ask, you will never get this.I decided I will try. I didn't believe tha it'll be fast. I didn't believe that a lot of people would love to support an unknown person, really stranger. I would say I wasn't a part of English speaking visual community for a long time. I was very focused on Ukraine and people I worked with. It was really needed that time so I never invested a lot of efforts and time to be in touch with English-speaking visual practitioners.However, it was an exciting moment when I realized that, oh, I can message some people I know. And that's how I messaged you and you were so kind to share my request. I created a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe and I just ask people if they will be so kind to support a person who has to start a new life from the scratch. And yeah, it was a magical period of two weeks when I was like sitting and realizing that unknown person from Malaysia sent me $5. A person I don't know.I really was sitting and sending mental love and kindness and gratitude to people I never saw before for the support and help. In two weeks we got the amount I needed and I bought myself an iPad and I was able to create again.It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. It made me think how much community matters and how we can really support each other. In my goal list is one day to pay it back or pay it forward. However, today I need to be focused on helping my country, and I try to do as much I can to work for Ukraine and to donate to support my people.MR: Well, that was a great story. I remember when you reached out and I thought, well, "This is exactly what our community is supposed to be here for. If we can't take care of someone like this, then what are we doing? Why are we even here?" When I posted it and encourage some friends, I just felt like, "Okay, come on, community. You gotta show up here 'cause this is what it's about."Everybody did. I haven't looked at the campaign, but I think we exceeded whatever--you had a a minimum requirement. I think we exceeded it by the end, which was really good feeling and a lot of people contributed. There was a variety of people, quite a list. So that was really encouraging to me to see that.JK: If you're listening now, this wonderful people, I'm sending you my best wishes and gratitude for supporting me. Thank you very much again.MR: It was exciting. It was really fun to see that happen and know that we were making an impact because we could all see what was happening. I think the other thing too was, I did some donations toward Ukraine for food and other stuff, but you feel like, especially in the U.S. maybe not so much in Europe, I guess, you sort of feel like it's so distant.Then the problem of the news cycle means, you know in a week you forget about it because it's not on the front page. The fact that I knew Ukrainians, it was more on my mind pretty often, but you feel a little bit like, how can I have an impact? You can donate, but it still feels like so distance. Having a person who started her life over and needs this help to do the things that we all do, that felt like, wow, I can actually apply something to a person who's doing the work that we do and she's part of our community and I've met her.That was a really great feeling to have that direct impact. Often the donations, you don't see the people getting fed, or the whatever you're donating to is sort of distant. So this was great to see it directly go to you and to help you move forward.As much as it helped you, I think it also helped us. In a community, it's really a win-win situation where you win because you can move forward and we win because we feel like we're making a difference in your life. That's a really great, great way to be.JK: That's like amazing. Since that time using this equipment, I already like finished more than 20 different projects for Ukraine. A few animations, a lot of visual notes. I was surprised, but by the end of the 2022, a lot of conferences had happened and most of them are now devoted to the topic, how can we support each other? How can we develop our country even in these circumstances? How can we rebuild our country?That made me think about what should I do when I come back to Ukraine. What will be my next step to support my country? I decided while I'm here in England, I have a great plan to make a master degree in illustration. It's a very strange choice for a visual practitioner to choose illustration because it's kinda what we are moving from because the idea of illustration is very different from what we are doing.It's about ideas not art, but I found out a very nice program which helps to design your learning path. And showed them what I'm doing and they said, "Okay, we're gonna support you in learning what whatever you need." Now I'm applying for university and this is a dream. I never told anyone except of my few friends about this. And today I'm sharing with everyone about this.I hope that when I come back to Ukraine, I will be able to illustrate something really important. Something about social issues, strategic sessions, how to rebuild the country, et cetera, et cetera. I want to really come back and being well prepared to this and have all the skills to show how much we can do when we work together and think visually.MR: That's really great. That's such a great wrap-up to that story. And it's not the wrap-up, right, because you still have it when you return, that will be the next phase of the story. It's great to hear that story and to hear that you're investing in yourself. 'Cause I think investing in yourself will eventually lead to investing in your country. That's a really great way to think about it long-term, I think.JK: I think every visual practitioner, going into metaphor is kind of a prism which accepts a light and helps to spread the light.MR: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.JK: If you can be a really sharp prism, you can do a lot of change in the world. I hope to be a nice prism for Ukraine.MR: Great. I love that imagery. I love that imagery. Well, it's hard to shift away. Just wanna keep on enjoying hearing about all the work that you're doing, but I think it's really important that we continue with tools. At this point, talk a little bit about what are your favorite tools. We'll start with analog tools, which I know maybe you're not using as much, but maybe they're still part of your practice. Then, of course, digital tools. What are your favorite software and other things that help you do the work you do?JK: Yeah, of course. Talking about analog tools, I'm not original. I use what master visual practitioners in the world use. I use quality markers like Neuland because they're available in Europe and phone board because I guess it's more thick and it stay longer than paper. I know that some companies I worked with still have this board in their offices. It helps to prolong the effect of session, which is visualized. Also, sometimes I use just usual paper like usual A4 paper and Pilot pen.Nothing really original. I always compare it to like, cooking our favorite Ukrainian dish, borscht. So if you come to a person who, usually it's a woman who made a nice borscht, you don't tell her, "Oh, you maybe have a good pot." Because it's all about skills.The same about visualization. Good equipment is important, but it's mostly dependent on skills and love and knowledge, not about only--when people learn sketchnoting with me, I always say, "No matter which instruments you have today, we'll draw anyway even if it is a toilet paper, I don't care. Please just bring some paper and some pens." When it comes to digital instruments, I use iPad Pro with a pencil and Procreate.I chose them just because a lot of visual practitioners in Facebook community advised it so I just started to use them and never switched to anything else. It's very unusual, but I would recommend a online service Canva, which is for non-designer. Because it's so well developed nowadays that you can really create something visual note style, even without drawing if you don't have anything like a tablet. It's very easy nowadays.For animations, I use Toonly and Doodly, which is kinda the same company who produces them. This is a very basic software. I'm pretty satisfied with what you can create because I didn't want to invest too much because I was not sure if I will continue doing this.But yeah, people are very satisfied with what I produce because it's very quick when you, for example, create an animation with cool animations today, it takes months. But I can really create it in a few days, which is amazing nowadays.MR: That's great. All the power is right there in that iPad with some software, which is great.JK: Yeah, that's true.MR: Cool. Well, I love that you have a simple tool set. I believe in being able to go to the drugstore and find your pens and your paper and be able to work. Again, it's really about your skills and your love and your soul, and not so much about the tools, but good tools do help, right? Bad tools can definitely distract.JK: Yeah.MR: Let's shift into tips now. The way I frame this is, imagine someone's listening who's a visual thinker, whatever that means to them. They feel like they're on a plateau, they're not growing, and they need some encouragement, they need some inspiration. What would be three things that you would tell them, either practical or theoretical to help them think about ways they can move forward?JK: It's a very nice question. I'm a person who needs a boost now because I start to work with absolutely new audience for me, English-speaking audience. I'll give this tips, first of all to myself, and I hope that they will be useful to someone else. The first principle I always use when I try to do something new when I need to learn something is like, fake it till you make it, but I change it a little bit. I do it as a game.You can pretend being a master in this and doing this, or you can think that you are a YouTube vblogger and you're telling to your audience how to do this or teach five-year-kid how to do this. I kinda try to pretend that I already know how to do this because I find it much easier to advice to someone than to do it myself. So I pretend that I'm just advising. So fake it till you make it with the first principle.The second one is about work-life balance. I never understood it earlier, but now I realize how it is important to observe beauty and consume quality content. I really recommend to get inspiration from everywhere, from colleagues, from traveling to follow people from different industries. For example, I found a lot of inspiration in design industry, psychology, coaching, facilitation. Just continue learning every day and follow good people on Instagram. Let's say this is the second tip.And the third one is a very important gift of allowing yourself to be yourself. What I mean by this that for example, I'm a very slow thinker and slow doer, so I give myself permission to do it in my own pace and with my own style is sometimes I think, "Oh my gosh, it's so ugly. Why people at all should like this or should pay for this, even."I know now that authenticity is the most important value nowadays. Authenticity is very important so please allow yourself to be yourself and be very kind to yourself. It's very easy to say, but it's very difficult to do. But it's a moment where you are healing your inner child and be just very kind to what you're doing. Talk to yourself as a caring parent and support yourself. It's wonderful what you can reach when you kind to yourself.MR: Those three are great. I love those tips. All three of those. The last one I especially like, and I often tell people, give yourself grace especially new learners who are doing sketch noting the very first time, like, "Okay, look, you've never done this before, how can you expect to be amazing?" It's gonna take time. Let yourself be yourself, in that sense. So I love that one, especially. Well, Julia, like we thought was gonna go really fast. So here we are at the end of the show. Can you believe it?JK: No, this is crazyMR: Now what I wanna do is let people know where they can find you, your social media. I'm gonna make the bet that your website will be done by the time this episode comes out. If it is, we'll make sure and put all these in the show notes. So if you wanna contact Julia and reach out to her to connect with her, if you've got projects for her. What is the best place to start?JK: Yeah, any social media, like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you can find me with the name Julia Knyupa. Hopefully, I will have a working website by the time when this episode will come up. Also, if you want to kinda learn something and to hear some inspiration from me on YouTube, there is my TEDx Talk in Ukrainian, but with English subtitles. It was in 2019, and I talked there about creative confidence. If you want to learn about this place, find this on YouTube.MR: Julia, we'll have you send some links to us and we'll make sure those get into the podcast show notes so people can click on it and watch that as well. Last question is, do you know what your website domain name or URL will be for the website yet?JK: Not yet.MR: Okay. Not yet. Normally, I would've had you give the website and then people would just type it in and go there, and maybe by the time they hear this it would be live, but that's okay.JK: I want to thank you for this wonderful chance to talk to you and to all of your people who are listening to this now. I know that it's tricky, but I want to ask you to continue to support Ukraine because the war is not over and we are fighting for the whole democracy and freedom in the world. So please continue to support Ukraine and I will be absolutely happy to work with people from different countries. Please reach me if you want to support Ukrainian artists.MR: Yes. I love it. I love it. We definitely will. Thank you, Julia, for your time. And for everyone listening, that’s another episode of the “Sketch Note Army podcast” wrapping up. And until the next episode, this is Mike and I'll talk to you soon.

In this episode, Lai Chee Chiu and Ferry Timp — two members of the organizing committee of ISC23NL in Leiden, The Netherlands — talk to us about the event that will hold September 1-3, 2023.Hear details about the full organizing team and a bit of the history of ISC. Learn how they decided on Leiden for the event’s location. Get a sneak peek of what to expect, what to do, and places to visit in Leiden. Prepare yourself for a festival vibe in this year's ISC!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 — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho are Ferry Timp and Lai Chee?Origin Story - ISC23 Leiden organizersWhy Leiden? What's exciting about ISC23NL?What's exciting about the city?Sponsor: ConceptsTipsWhere to find more about ISC23NLOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.International Sketchnote Camp Website International Sketchnote Camp on Instagram International Sketchnote Camp on LinkedInSketchnote Army Slack Channel Check out the #isc23nl channel!TipsCarry along the right shoes because you'll need them for a walk around the city. There will be guided walks facilitated by the tourist bureau.Museum visits with the support from Leiden Convention Bureau.Canal boat trips. Bike riding around the town.Lots of pubs, restaurant, theaters, and small band performances.CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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 my friends Lai Chee and Ferry Timp. How are you guys doing?Lai Chee Chiu: We're good, thank you. And you?MR: Doing well. Ferry doesn't know what to say. He's too—Ferry Timp: No. I was trying not to speak, the both of us at the same time, but I'm okay too. Thanks, Mike.MR: You're so welcome. The reason we have Lai Chee and Ferry on the call is they are some of the organizing team, there's more team than just them, organizing the International Sketch Note camp happening in Leiden in September of this year. We're super excited. I am attending the event. My flight is purchased, my hotel is booked. I'm excited to get back to the Netherlands. I think I was there in 2014 in Amsterdam and really had a great time, so, I'm excited to come back.And we thought it would be helpful on this episode to talk a little bit about the International Sketch Note camp. We can talk a little bit about history. Specifically, we'll talk mostly about Leiden and how the team was formed, why they decided to choose Leiden as the city, some of the benefits of Leiden, the things that they're excited about, and maybe some tips. I think we understand Ferry's got some tips around places to see if you are in the city.FT: I have the shirt already, so.MR: He's got the shirt, he's ready to go. For those who are listening, he's got a beautiful Leiden football team sweatshirt that he's wearing, representing the city. Let's get into it. Let's first start with—people may remember Lai Chee from a previous episode where she was focused on, but we may not know who Ferry is. Let's start with Ferry and then we'll go to Lai Chee, and tell us who you are and what you guys do.FT: Okay. Well, I'm Ferry from the Netherlands. I'm educated as a certified public accountant. I've worked for 12 years at PWC in the Netherlands. And after that, I decided that it was time for me for a next step so I started to work for the City of Leiden as an internal auditor, and I did that for seven years. Why did I end up at ISC and stuff like that?That's because in 2018, it was, I guess, I was looking for this powerful tool to communicate all my findings, because yeah, auditors are good at one thing, it's writing reports that no one can read. All these difficult sentences. I was really looking for how can I do this differently.I tried to find some nice images on Google, but if you find one, basically, something is missing in it. Then I discovered this amazing tool, and it was holding a pencil, start drawing again. It was really helpful in making simple and clear images of key messages.What I found out was that it was really nice to see how the other parties, like I was in the council, and they were trying to read my reports, but when I came back with just drawings, they were enthusiastic. They got immediately what I meant and it was very nice. That's why when I started with drawing and I never stopped.MR: Really great.FT: Just to keep it short because I don't do short very well.MR: Well, it's good to hear an accountant who's excited about using visualization.FT: Exactly.MR: The longer I'm doing this, I see more and more variety of people doing this work, which is exciting to me because when you do the principles and you put them out there, you don't know who's going to pick it up. You just assume for me, other designers just make sense. But beyond that, maybe teachers, but now I've got physicists and accountants and business people, and all kinds of other people, because I think we're visual creatures.I think it really helps. It provides another way to look at something, especially if the stuff you're doing is really important. If people are blowing off your reports and not really understanding them, they're losing value that they could gain so that's, you're helping communicate those ideas.FT: Exactly.MR: How about you, Lai Chee?LCC: I have a background in drawing, but I didn't do anything after school. At some point, I was looking for a team event and we figured out that I was drawing for business and pizza and beer. That was the perfect team event. That's what we did. And that was around 2016, I believe. And then we didn't do anything about it till I came across the de tekenende actors from the de betekenaar, where Ferry works at this moment.And I met Ferry there because we were taking the online course and joined the community together. We've been talking and drawing together ever since. He started to draw for work, and I started to draw for work. I'm currently a freelancer and drawing is a communication tool for me.I'm not a graphic recorder. I do graphic facilitation, but not recording. And it's just a way of taking notes. That's what we call sketch notes.MR: Exactly. Exactly. Well, that's really great. I wondered what the connection was between the two of you, and now it makes so much sense.LCC: We go a long way back now. Yeah.FT: We go a long way back, yeah.MR: That's pretty cool.LCC: But we also did face-to-face courses together.FT: Yeah. It was visual facilitation, four-day course.LCC: Yeah, visual facilitation.MR: Super nice. Tell me now a little bit more about the remainder of the team. I think there's three or four other people, I can't remember the number. You have a pretty relatively large group for an organizing team, which is great because you spread the load. I know the French team was a larger team. And I think that really helped them compared to, I think the first team in Hamburg was four.And then Luis had a partner that he worked with in Portugal. His advantage is that was his business, running workshops. He had that advantage. But if you're a team of people and you can spread it out across a lot that helps. Tell us about the other team members.FT: Shall I do it, Lai Chee?LCC: Yeah, sure.FT: Okay. We are in total with seven people, so besides us, it's five more. To start with there are two members that were originally the initiators of ISC23. Those are Claudia Unseld and Henk Wijnands. They started to look for others to join. I believe that Vincent Kober, he was the third one because he also attended last year in Poland, the ISC.He had asked for something like, "Is there a program, or how do you start such a thing and organizing?" He had asked Chris Wilson this question, like, "Is there something you can hand over?" And he was like, "No, there isn't." But the fact that he asked was for Chris, something nice to tell to Claudia, like, "Okay, Vincent is also looking for maybe the possibility of organizing."After that, I believe Lai Chee who also was there, was asked to participate. And Corine Matser, my colleague from De Betekenaar, she was also there in Poland. Then there was a group of five, and they thought, "Well, that's not enough. We need a couple more."And then Ingrid Nouwens, she's in the south of the Netherlands and New Henk already. So, Henk asked her. Corine came to me and said, "Ferry, we have this great idea, just a small project. Do you join us?" And I said, "Well, of course, I'll join. And then we had this team of seven. I don't know what you want me to tell more. I could go on for hours about that.MR: Well, I think it's good to state the names of the other team members. Everyone's working together. Again, I think that's great that you have a large team. It probably makes communication more challenging. Anytime a team gets larger, that just is a natural challenge, you can't avoid it. But the benefits are that you can spread the load which is really important for a big event like this.It's good to hear other names. Thank you everyone on the team for what you're doing because I know it's a lot of work. I've spoken to lots of these teams, and I know how much work it is. Maybe let's shift a little bit toward how did you decide? Was it Henk and Claudia, who made that first move? How did this all come about?And secondly, how did you choose Leiden? Because there's lots of cities in the Netherlands. Amsterdam being one, although probably expensive. Talk to us a little bit about that too. What led you to Leiden? Maybe we'll talk a little—let's let Lai Chee take this one.LCC: We all look in our own neighborhoods, and because Ferry worked in Leiden, he knew Leiden pretty well so he came up with Leiden but I, of course, was with them and who came along. Claudia and Vincent don't live in the Netherlands. Those are the cities that we choose from. And then of course, we looked at the cost, but also what happens when we don't sell the tickets, so till when can we cancel, those conditions. The PLNT in Leiden was so enthusiastic, and they really, really convinced us, and the price was good and also the services and the whole team is thinking with us. There was just actually a no-brainer too—it was quite simple, right?FT: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.MR: It sounds like Amsterdam really never was an option. Is that mainly because of cost? I mean, you get the advantage. The beautiful thing about Leiden, from my perspective, looking from the outside, is it's just a train ride from Amsterdam. So, I can fly into Amsterdam, I can get good rates on my flights, and then simply hop on a train or whatever, and then make my way to the Southwest, and here I am. To get the benefits of Amsterdam without the chaos of Amsterdam, maybe, I don't know, or the pricing.FT: Yeah, I guess that's—LCC: But it's also practical that you have someone who knows the city very well.MR: Yes. Yes.LCC: Of course, we've been in Amsterdam, but we know our own city the best.FT: I get lost in Amsterdam.LCC: Yeah, me too.MR: Well, that's good to know. And I think that's an interesting pattern as well. Thinking all the way back to Hamburg. Not all the team members were from Hamburg. I think they had two who were local. Who knew the city, they knew they could talk to venues, they knew the place. They found this really cool place that was reasonable. All those things had to line up. Same thing with in Portugal, Luis knew places that he could go.Same thing with Paris. Many of the members on that team were with BNP Paribas. They found out that everybody's on holidays in France in August. We have this beautiful meeting center we can get access to. Again, I think that's really important. Is there someone there locally who—'cause there's also logistical things, right?Like, who's gonna order the bread to show up at three o'clock? Or who's gonna make sure the coffee is there or the whatever. I'm sure there's all these questions, and having somebody local who knows the city and knows people there, it's really important. So that's good to hear.Maybe what we could talk about now, and I'll point this one at Ferry and then Lai Chee, is what has you excited about this version of the ISC in Leiden? What's the thing or things that you're most excited looking forward to? Is there some part of it that you're excited about? We'll start with Ferry and then we'll go to Lai Chee after that.FT: Cool. It's cool. What's not to be enthusiastic about at the moment? Because at the beginning when you start organizing this, then it's all like these things, like, okay, are we a team? And the second question is, do we want to go for this? Do we have dates that we're aiming at? After that it's like, can we do it? Can we find a venue? Can we find a caterer? How does the budget look like? Do you think we can do it?Those are all very important questions, but it's also like, yeah, it's tough to get there and it's also I think, the most boring thing. Right now we are on this train. We have all these ideas about how do we want to organize it. You see at our backgrounds if you're not just listening to us, but see us on the screens, on YouTube, then you can see like we want to go for this festival vibe.And I think that's something really cool because for me, ISC, I've never been there. I was planning on twice. The first time that I wanted to be part of it was the online version in Brussels, but then life happened. The last time, I was all set up to participate and something happened. I don't want to talk about it right now, but yeah, that's what happens. For me, it's like really to meet all these like-minded people, to learn together, to be inspired, to get new ideas. That's what I like about it.This year in our team, we are all really an enthusiastic about what can we do next to it. Because a lot of us have attended to previous editions and they're very enthusiastic about what you guys did there. But then it was also like, "Okay, can we do a next step? How can we make the connection more or professionalize a little bit?" I think Lai Chee is going to mention something about that later on.For me, this festival thing, to do it slightly different. To ask Mike Rohde to come to it and to let us present him as a rockstar. And now we have a second rockstar, Ben Crothers is going over to the Netherlands. That's so nice. And just to get the excitement about this and all these ideas that start to pop up, because it's in Leiden, it's in the Netherlands.We want to go outside when we're there because Leiden is a rich city with a lot of ancient buildings. There's an old castle on a hill in the middle of that old ancient city center, so let's go out. But then again, it's the Netherlands, because, you know it's September, it could rain. So like, festival vibe maybe have some ponchos over and pimp your poncho workshops. I don't know, we go crazy like that.But in the end, it's not all just about having fun, it's about connection, it's about learning new things. Also, the rockstars we get, we want to see if we can deepen more on the field of visual thinking, working with a pencil, sketchnoting. That's for me. Lai Chee.LCC: One thing that we all had in common is how can we go to the next level. Many of us are already couple of years. Even if you are a newbie, you watch some videos or things. You have an idea what this is about. But what we all felt a little bit is that often people think it's some sort of a hobby that we have, and don't even realize that we have really jobs next to it.Some of us are accountants or consultants or teachers or whatever. And if you bring a group together like that, then you have massive brain power. So why don't we use it and why don't we see how can we help each other? I know a couple of people, Ferry knows a couple of people, or you probably know a lot of people, but do we also know who can complement us?So, if I need someone or certain skill, I know what Ferry is capable of so if I miss that skill, I know I can come to him. There are so many sketch noters. I don't know what the talent is for people. So, we came up with a theme. So that's the past, the present, and the future that will go through the whole event but also nourish and flourish.Even if you're a newbie, so what do you need to nourish your skill and what is the future? Especially with the AI and all the technology coming up, so what does that mean for our things and how can we embrace it? This is also why our theme is also key to discover new horizons because the world is changing and it's changing very, very fast. What does that mean for us? Not only for sketch noters but also all the occupations and professions we have. That's a little bit what we are trying to do. So, the past, present, and the future.MR: I really like this idea. I would describe it as a holistic festival. So, you're not just doing one thing, like a narrow thing just for professionals. If you're not professional, don't come. Like, it's not that. It's, we have a professional thing. If you're doing it for fun thing, we're expanding your thinking. We're having you think about the future, we're not forgetting the past, like all these things, we're having fun. That's exciting. That makes me wanna come even more. That it's gonna be a fun event.LCC: I hope so.MR: Being part of it, right? Honestly, you think about what we've been through with the pandemic where we've had to go online, you need to think about events, like if you're doing an in-person event, you need to think about it in that way, that it has to be multi-dimensional. It has to have multiple angles that will attract someone.As with many of these events, you might be really excited about one part of it and totally get into that and maybe you're not as interested in say the professional thing, I don't know. Or maybe you're really interested in the professional thing and you don't wanna do some other thing. You've got that option.I tell people you know, in many of the past events, all I did was just sit around and talk to people for the whole time. I never went to a class. I would do my keynote and I would just sit around and I finally get to talk to Ferry. I finally get to sit down and talk with Lai Chee. I finally get to sit down and talk with whoever, right?That was my whole time was just—and I loved it. It was great just talking with people the whole time, understanding them, seeing what they're doing. That was a great result for me. And then hanging out with people at the end at nighttime or whatever.Some of my best memories from the past events were not only the event, but then we would go wandering around Hamburg or something, and looking for a place to eat and having fun as a group. I think a lot of it even is just providing the environment in which things could happen.It's almost like being a gardener in some ways. Like if you prepare really good ground, you can grow anything you want to. That sounds a lot like what you're preparing from my perspective, which is a really exciting.LCC: Yeah, exactly. That's the whole festival feeling, so you're not stuck to one lecture or whatever. So you have to move. That's the whole point.MR: Yeah. This is really great. We've talked a little bit about what's exciting about it. We talked about the history and how it came about. Talk a little bit about the city itself. You sort of hinted at this before. What is a city like? What I know about the city is it's a university city, I believe. It's southwest of Amsterdam, so it's a train ride or I guess a taxi ride if you had to go to Amsterdam.FT: Yeah, train and taxi.MR: What else can you tell us about the city? Sounds like it's old. I'll stop there and get some—FT: Yeah, it is old. Yeah, it's old.MR: Which is cool.FT: That's where it starts. Leiden, it is a city. It is a truly Dutch city. We have canals that you also find in Amsterdam, the famous canals. Also, the buildings next to the canals, like the different kind of houses that you'd like to see the staircase, the shaped roofs. Yeah, exactly.Leiden is everything that Amsterdam has, but just a little bit smaller. A lot smaller, I guess. It's like really this typical Dutch vibe. If you live abroad and you think of Holland, you always see pictures of us wearing wooden shoes and living next to or in a windmill. But a windmill is also there in Leiden.If you step out of the train station, you walk towards the city and you look to your left, there's a windmill. So, if you're a tourist, you want to see that. Leiden has it all. The fun thing is, like you said, it's very close to a lot of large cities in the Netherlands. It's located at, I think it's slightly more than just 50 minutes from Schiphol airport. It's where you arrive. It's one-stop with the train. It's really easy like that.Amsterdam is close, and on the other side, if you go a little bit to the south, there's the Hague and Rotterdam. Those are all also very large cities in the Netherlands. Leiden, it's like ancient. There's a lot of culture. There's an endless list of museums. That's also nice. We can fill in the whole program of the festival also by visiting several museums with a lot of topics that we could choose. So that's nice.As you mentioned, it has a large university, and it is the oldest university we have in the Netherlands. It was the first one. I think it was the Spanish possessor that started this university. And it has a rich history, of course, but it's also, therefore, Leiden is a city of students.There's a lot happening. If you want to grab a beer somewhere or eat something, there are a lot of clubs. There are a lot of restaurants next to the canal. There's choice enough for everyone to blend in, to get a really good taste of the Netherlands, but also being among young people. That's also very nice.Also, Leiden has one of the biggest bioscience parts in Europe that's also there. Science technology is also richly there. A lot of the great national and international companies are situated there. It's also an international town, so they are used to people walking around in the city during daylight talking French or English.It's also not just a city that's like, "Oh, oh, is that a foreigner." No. You hear English a lot on the street. That's very nice. This culture thing, I can go on forever, as you have noticed. It's also the city where [unintelligible 24:35] was born. If you have painters and look at his paintings, it's a lot of inspiration from that side.Okay, last thing is, Albert Einstein lived there. Not his whole life, but he visited, I think it was—I wrote it down because I thought, let's try to give you some factual data thing. He came first to Leiden in 1911. He was so enthusiastic about Leiden that from 1920, every year he lived one month totally in Leiden because he loved it so much, and he worked on the university there.There was a fun fact that when he needed some rest and some time off, he visited the Observatory of Leiden. Leiden has its own observatory. You can just reach the stars and go outside. Is this enough about Leiden? Or do you want more?MR: That's great. It sounds like anytime I hear a university city or college town, that always has big advantages. Austin, Texas is one of those. University of Oxford is there. If you ever go to Austin there's lots of options for eating and drinking and activity, and it's usually pretty reasonable because students have to pay for it so the cost is low. You have all the advantages of Amsterdam without all the hassles of Amsterdam.FT: Exactly.MR: Not that there's a lot of—I mean, when I was in Amsterdam, I had a great time, but it is big to navigate. I think I rode a bus to an event and it took a little bit of a ride across the city. Probably in Leiden, I would just walk there because it's not so big.FT: Yeah. That the biggest advantage of Leiden. You don't need to worry about, "Oh, can I get a taxi cab from my hotel to the venue at PLNT where we are hosting this? It's at walking distance. Almost everything is at walking distance. And also, if you stay a little bit longer, you come over a day earlier, maybe it's also a bus ride away from the beach. Leiden at sea, it's not the name. It's Katwijik aan Zee but they call it Leiden at the beach in Leiden. This is also nice if you want to go out, you're just a bus ride away from the beach.MR: Lots of options and lots of variety of—FT: Lots of options. Yeah.MR: It fits everybody.FT: Come over for two weeks and you'll enjoy yourself.LCC: Exactly.MR: For a holiday. Make it a holiday. Well, that's really great. I'm excited to see what you have planned. I didn't mention before the idea of pushing it further. I'm a push-it-further kind of guy myself. Always experimenting and trying new things. So, when you say that, that really attracts my thinking, that means we can do some new things.I think a lot of times—and I like reason experimentation is we have so much opportunity and flexibility and capability available to us that we don't use it. We just do the same thing over and over again, and there's opportunities to do really cool new things if we just give it a try.Especially, I think there, it's like, "Well, what if I fail?" Well, so what? The experiment didn't work. You learn something and you'll do it a different way next time. I think hearing that is pretty exciting to hear that there will be some things pushing the boundaries a little bit, and we can have some fun.Thank you for sharing this sense of things. I'm gonna go back to Ferry one more time. And this is for those who are coming to Leiden. We asked Ferry if he could give us what would be three things you should make sure that you should do when you're in Leiden. You can go more than that, but three is only required.FT: Okay. Well, first thing, of course, you need to come to ISC. But that one doesn't count, because that's too easy.MR: That's assumed.FT: That's assumed. I think first thing that you need to do is take along the right shoes because you need to go for a walk. There's this nice park around the canals. It's all the way surrounding the ancient city. You can walk really like in a circle. It's new since, I guess for two, three, maybe four years or now. It's a really nice walk around town.We also make sure that we will arrange with the tourist bureau because they also have guided walks. We will provide all the participants with those tips. But this is really nice to walk around visit the castle on the hill, like I already mentioned, is you have a great view of Leiden on the rooftops and see that. I think that's the first thing.There's also this really cool, but small I think it was some sort of museum, but like on Rembrandt vaan Rijn. You can do also things like that. I think for us, sketch noting, and if you want to draw something, but really like, get inspired from his kind of style, that's also something really nice.I can mention all the museums, but pick one. There are multiple museums, so we will make sure—we have support from it's called Leiden Convention Bureau. They have created a landing page, especially for us, for our participants. So, if you click on it, and the link is on our website so everybody can see. There's a rich amount of museums with tips. You could go here, and this museum is about this and stuff.You could go on a canal boat trip for some people who like to just really sit down, have a glass of drink, and just without having to walk, you could just see a lot of the city. And of course, you're in the Netherlands, and we all ride bikes. So, we have possibilities to ride bikes explore the city like that. So that's also an option.Of course, when you've done all that, there are multiple, like pubs, restaurants. There's a theater, I don't know. They have also a small like theater where bands—it's not the large bands and large musicians, but yeah. Also, international acts, that could also be a possibility. I'm more than three, right?MR: That's okay.FT: What I'm trying to say is like the festival vibe you have on ISC, you could easily take it with you if we close down, like say at the end of Saturday, take it with you, and go into the city and we'll have more fun like that.Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, I think this has been helpful. Tickets as we record this, are about to go on sale. We don't know what sales will look like by the time this releases. We encourage you to go take a look and find out for yourself if this is encouraging and exciting to you.We suspect there's people who've already booked their tickets who are listening to this to get a more of a feel for the organizing team and the thought behind it and those kinds of things. So, whoever you are, we would love to have you in Leiden in September.FT: Definitely.MR: Any final thoughts from either of you before we wrap up and point people at the website so they can have a look at tickets and details? Maybe I'll start with Lai. Lai Chee, do you have any final thoughts, any encouragement for someone who maybe is considering it?MR: No. I mean, I'm not really objective. I am super, super excited. Last year in Poland, I was already excited because it's not only the event, but you also meet all those people you just only know online. We are gonna meet you for the first time. I know you are all ready for four years or something, but this is the first time I'm gonna see you live. That's the other thing. What we also will try to do is to make connections in the before phase. Before we go to the event that we know each other a little bit better than when we actually will meet. So, just come.FT: Yeah. Exactly. I think that's a good point, because for me, that's also, it's like the most fun thing is it's a live event and we can do that again. We haven't been able to do it a couple of years. Last time in Poland it was already happening again. I think that's nice.Like Lai Chee mentioned, I think it was our idea as well to like it starts in September, but what if we do a before phase? What if we ask Mike Rohde if we can use Sketchnote Army Slack to meet upfront online, do some stuff. We have really fun things planned out. Maybe some sketch note or no, it wasn't the sketch note. Try to make a picture together if living close and post them online like that. So the community building will start up front.I think that's really nice. This festival fight, we try to take it creatively. Sometimes we brainstorm and we get all the crazy ideas. What's the most fun part of part about organizing this, you could go crazy and think of all those things. And then, of course, it's not just two of us because we go crazy a lot, but then we have the others that say, "Okay, let's get real. Let's get real. Okay, this is not going to happen because it's too complicated. But I like this and how about this."That's also nice. Everybody should go because it's like a mini break. It's a holiday, a mini holiday break and it's investing in you and in your skills and growing as a professional and expanding your community with all these cool people, like-minded visual people, your visual friends, I guess.LCC: Exactly. Exactly. Nourish and flourish. Those are the two words you have to remember for this event. Nourish and flourish.FT: They're not on our posters, but those are key values that we try every time to incorporate in our program. If we decide like, okay, do we want this for a workshop? Then we all say to each other, okay, does it contribute to nourishing or flourishing our community, our guests, our participants?MR: Those two words are great because it focuses on improving yourself and then improving the world when you flourish. That sounds really fun. Well, thank you both so much for being on the show and sharing all your excitement. I can feel it coming through the wires. If someone is interested in checking out the event and seeing if tickets are still available, what would be the place to go for them? Is there a URL that you would recommend? Or maybe should they go to social media location first, and that we'll direct them to the site?FT: Yeah, we have a website. It's www.sketchcamp2023.nl. This is the website that we've launched. I believe if you go to the website, sketchnotcamp.com that was what the team used last year. There's also a link that directs you to our website. For the socials, we are on two social platforms. We are on Instagram and we are on LinkedIn. We are not on Twitter at the moment for this year, but we've posted there also a message that "Okay, this year we're not there, but we'll hand over the Twitter account to the organizing team of next year."MR: Good. We'll, of course, put links to those things so you can just look in the show notes and click away wherever you're at. That'll be the easiest way to jump in and check things out. We'll make sure that's taken care of. Well, thank you two for being on the show. It's really good to hear your excitement again. Especially, Ferry with so much experience being in the city itself makes me wanna visit.It's like the way I am with Milwaukee when people tell me they want to come here. I can spend an hour telling them all the great things and where they should go and what they should do. I feel that same thing from you. And then Lai Chee, I feel the excitement for you around the programming and the experience as well, right?LCC: Yeah.MR: Being from another city, you can appreciate all the benefits. Probably, the last thing I would say is don't discount the value of relationships. That you might come for the programming, but the relationships—like some of my most treasured friends I've met at ISCs and was an opportunity, and led to in some cases work opportunities or support opportunities where they gave me advice or help me out with something. Networks are valuable and you should always build them before you need them. So, this is your opportunity to build your network. That would be my pitch.FT: Amen.LCC: Yes.MR: Well, that wraps another episode of the "Sketch Note Army Podcast". Until the next episode, this is Mike and Lai Chee, and Ferry Timp signing off for now. See you soon.

In this episode, Maria Coryell-Martin shares how her passion emerged out of collaborating with scientists to help tell their stories through art.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’ infinite canvas lets you to sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea or to keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most.The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Maria Coryell-Martin?Origin StoryMaria’s current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find MariaOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.ArtToolkitArt Tool kit on InstagramArt tool kit recommend seriesArt Toolkit NewsletterJuneau Certified Research ProgramBrushmaker storyGet 10% discount at arttoolkit.com with code SKETCHNOTE10 through June 1st, 2023.ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.All-in-one Zipper pouchPentel water brushesWaterproof penSketchbookSharpie penPentel brush penPelikano fountain pensCopic multilinersHelvetica pencilsRosemary & Co travel watercolor brushescollapsible cupNo-needle syringeBinder clipsRubber bandsPaper toweliPhone miniProcreateTipsUse a timer and set yourself a very small amount of time to do something.Give yourself the opportunity to play with color, what you see, and don't worry about composition.Paying attention to the world and just letting yourself start with notes just to start that attention.Trust the process.Practice not perfection.CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe 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 my friend Maria Coryell-Martin. Maria, it's so good to have you on the show.Maria Coryell-Martin: Oh, I'm thrilled to be here, Mike. Thank you so much for having me.MR: You're so welcome. I had an opportunity to work with you on your YouTube channel, I think, was that last year or 2021? I can't remember now. It's so all a blur. We had a blast working together and you popped in mind for this season, and I said I need to have Maria on to talk about the work she's doing because she's a really interesting person. It's gonna stretch our listeners' minds a little bit further, which is always a good thing. Why don't you begin by telling us who you are and what you do?MC-M: Great. Well, my name is Maria and I'm an expeditionary artist and also the founder of Art Toolkit. I wear a lot of hats in my work.MR: Exactly.MC-M: Business owner and artist. The expeditionary art part came first. I've always been passionate about art, science, and education. And using a sketchbook is really how I've interpreted the world, and going out and just nonstop sketching ever since I was really little. I brought a few things to share so those of you who pop over to YouTube later.My father was a scientist and so I grew up really curious about his work and the scientific process. Part of his work brought him to the Arctic. He was studying the formation of sea ice. We grew up with Arctic parkas in the closet, and I remember big maps on the ceiling of my room.His work also brought him to Japan where he was invited to teach. This had a big influence on me because we lived down the street from a brush maker in Tokyo. The brush I'm holding up right now is one that he made out of my own hair before I left when I was, I think 11 years old. I would go up there and paint with him and my mom would help, but we didn't speak much of the same language, but the connecting over art was a really important part of my experience.He made this brush as becoming of age gift for me out of my own hair which he told me was a tradition in Japan. Ever since I was young, I've really known that art has this important place and who I am and how I experience the world, and how I can interact with it. That's where that idea of art as a tool started for me as a tool for communication, for education, for learning, for connecting, and haven't really stopped with that.MR: That's really great. And that's led, of course, to Art Toolkit, which is your business that sells materials that encourage that expeditionary art mindset or activity.MC-M: Yeah. With expeditionary art, I went to Carleton College. I grew up in Seattle, Carleton's in Minnesota, and really enjoyed traveling in part, maybe to get away from some of those Minnesotan winters, but had the opportunity to do some terrific study abroad programs, including the South Pacific, which was an art and printmaking program, Mali, West Africa, to study French and local culture and dialects languages. And took myself on some independent projects.Everywhere I went, the sketchbook again was such a part of what I did and how I experienced the world. After graduating Carleton, I had what's called a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel and paint for a year. The Watson basically funds dreams for unique opportunity for 50 select graduates of this consortium of colleges.My particular dream was to travel to remote regions and paint and learn about how the landscape impacted me and the artists I can meet, how the landscape was reflected through their art. Long story short, I got a lot of practice in painting and traveling, and really my passion emerged outta that of collaborating with scientists whenever possible to help tell their story through art 'cause I've always loved science.The Art Toolkit came because I had this puzzle of traveling with art supplies and needing to keep everything portable. As an artist, part of just who I am is I really like to make things and to try and make things better. I was always tinkering every trip with the tools I had.I'm holding up now my first little watercolor palette I made, which just of out of an Altoids tin. And inside it is Sculpey, which I pushed a pencil in to make little holes and spray paint it. You see, Sculpey is really heavy, and so, it's not really like a backpacking pallet, and it's a little bulky.I thought, "I want stuff to be all in one, what can I do better?" Here's another one. This pallet is out of a Lamy safari pencil box or open box. I used this time little plastic pans that I could glue inside the tin. Some of them I put on magnets and held a lot more colors. It's lighter weight than my old mint tin, but still heavy.I had a trip to Eastern Greenland in 2010 with a walrus biologist. It was just really fun trip. We did a lot of sneaking up on walruses to observe them. The scientists were taking tissue samples, which was a cool process because they basically modified a crossbow to shoot a little tiny metal plug into—like imagine the tip of a pencil, you know? That was hollow.It'd take just a little plug of tissue out of the animal to get a little DNA sample. The walrus were sleeping in the sun, and they would grumble when they got poked. And then they'd fall back asleep, like, not a big deal. But sneaking up on these animals, we'd wear these zipper suits like machinist suits over our big warm gear, and we'd be crawling into sand so we wouldn't scare them.This is where the quantity of gear I had with me was really confronting practicality because I had my camera and an audio recorder and my sketchbook and my trusty watercolor box, but it would wiggle down as I was falling in the sand and keeping track of it felt like a challenge.That was the summer that Art Toolkit really started where I came back and my final watercolor palette that set the stage was this little business card tin, I'd adapted and found, okay, now I've got a pallet that can fit inside a zipper pouch and I can take anywhere a lot easier. I started making them myself with the help of a local company that helped with the pouches and making the little pallets. That was over 10 years ago.MR: Wow. Wow. That's really cool. That's I think the best kind of tools where it's not just something you make up and hope that it fits. It's like you actually field-tested everything to get to the point of like, okay, this is really working. I'm sure you field-tested that little business card thing as well to make sure everything worked. Just your nature, right?When you buy something from that a company or a maker, you take advantage of all that fieldwork that you've done, so you know it's gonna work when you get in that situation, it's not gonna fail you.MC-M: Yeah. I try and solve problems for myself. Then there's a point at which you think, with my work as an expeditionary artist that was around my passion for art, science, and education and wanting to go out, but I kept thinking, hey, I really wanna help share this with others and wanna help inspire and empower others for their own education or their own adventures and just going out.And so, I wanted to make tools to share and then kept making them better. Since then, we've done a lot of adapting to this palette from modifying it and changing the materials. We have them in three sizes. As if that wasn't small enough, we've got this really one size because it's so cute. I really like cute little things. My daughter teases me 'cause I'm always seeing your little cute things. Then we've got one that is about twice as big, but still slim.MR: Pretty thin. Slimness. I've got one of your kits, probably your smallest kit which includes a notebook. It's got a pallet and a water brush, and then it's all inside of a nice, pretty small, like a nylon zipper case. It all fits in there. Yep. Right there.We'll have links to Art Toolkit so you can go—if you're listening and you're not looking at anything, you're in the car or something. When you get to your destination, you can pop up a link and look at the breadth of tools. I think the other thing I like about the way you approach things is, well, of course, you're making tools that are tested and purpose-built 'cause that's really cool.The other thing I like is that you really focus on education. Like, having me on to talk about sketchnoting with people that like your tools or you're always doing stuff and then sharing. I think that's a really big key. It's not just that you're making tools, but you're actually showing them in practice and how to use them. It just makes for a whole integrated way of looking at what you're doing, which is really cool.MC-M: Oh, I'm so glad you appreciate that. It's been just central to our values and then the values now of Art Toolkit, you know, it's grown much beyond just me now about, I don't know what it was now, maybe when my daughter was two or three, she's seven and a half now.I realize I needed help with shipping and assembling and brought my mother-in-law in so to be my shipper, and she's still our primary shipper. Finally, got my husband on, and now we've got a team of about eight folks who work, some full-time, some part-time in making it, but really trying to keep those core values.I just think it's so neat. I get a little thrill when I see people out in the world and I get so inspired by other people's work. I suppose it's a little bit selfish in wanting that inspiration, but then the fun of sharing it and delighting.I tell you, Mike, the words that were mantras for me through the whole pandemic was just community and creativity. It was just like nourishing. I know that was the point where we connected. It's been something that's really grounded me.Well, that's great. I know sketchnote community is in a similar place. We all care for each other and lots of sharing and support and encouragement. The same thing happened for me kinda leaning into that community when the pandemic happened, knowing that there were other people like me that needed a connection, and so, well, let's make stuff, let's provide that.It sounds like you're on a similar path. That's really cool. You talked a little bit briefly about living in Japan with your parents and getting a brush made from your hair. I'm gonna now switch into your origin story. Now, you don't have to go and tell us every detail, we talked a little bit as we prepared for this. What were the key moments in your life that led you to where you're at and maybe some that specifically, I guess, integrated visual thinking into those decisions?I'm sure that living in Japan had a huge impact on the way you thought about visual thinking and observation and the way different cultures are and probably led to your interest in travel. There's probably a bunch of things that it probably influenced. Maybe start from when you were a little girl and became aware of the world and you're traveling with your dad and take us from there.MC-M: That's a great question. A few key moments come to mind. One was, so I've been to Japan four times and the first trip I was in grade school, I think. I don't know if it was summer after third grade or first grade, I can't quite remember.But the sketchbook for me then was just such a direct communication tool because I'd be sitting around with kids and I was out there with my family, but we spent a lot of time with other families and kids of that my parents were meeting and working with. I just remember describing things like, how we got to school. And they'd draw a picture of how they got to school, and I draw a picture of how I got to school or like what we ate.It was such this means of connecting and just like you said, that visual language. That stayed with me because it's brought joy and connection, and just like having conversations through a sketchbook. In high school, I loved art and I did a lot of outdoor education, but I really vividly remember, and I wish I'd grabbed this out of my files to show you, integrating art into my other classes as much as I could.For example, I had a mythology class where we'd have to write or review stories and instead of just, typing up or writing up a report, I put together a little book out of greeting cards, which I like sewed together and drew tiny little cartoon pictures with the whole stories for the whole assignment. Then I stuck in an envelope and gave it to the teacher who really enjoyed it.For me, it was a way of storytelling through art in my own way, and it helped me learn also. Which I think really relates to like the sketch noting of just visual processing and attention. Then another really formative moment was I spent two summers with the Juneau Icefield Research Program in Southeast Alaska.Each was a full summer one as a student in high school and one later coming back to help be a staff and artisan residence. That first summer, especially the ice field was this really stunning environment of rock and ice. Living in this environment, in these little cabins and traveling with a really neat group of people, science-oriented, also learning about field safety, so doing a lot of practice around crevice rescue and skiing and being safe in this place.And I just remember really coming away with, meanwhile, I'm always sketching, that idea of just coming at a subject from different perspectives. As an artist appreciating light and shadow, shapes, this sort of visual vocabulary. Then as a scientist, thinking about the why and asking questions.For example, crevices and why they're forming where they are, these practical elements. Then from this wilderness experience of how to safely navigate it, and travel it. Then also there's this emotional experience of this space that could change dramatically from this really wide-open landscape where you're skiing 10 miles and you can see your destination, but it feels like you're moving at the snail’s pace or having the fog come in and all of a sudden, you're on the inside of a ping pong ball.Emotionally can be this entirely different feeling may be from going from this vast spaciousness to just this insular world. That made me just think a lot about how much I enjoy learning all these different aspects, and that's really was brought me to this expeditionary art of art, science, and education.MR: The sense that I'm getting from you to this point is you have a real fascination with layering. It's not enough that you learn, it's not enough that you're observing scientific phenomena, it's not enough that you're experiencing something emotionally, then you're layering on this art layer to try and capture it or express it or explain it. There's all this layering going on from what I hear.MC-M: Yeah. It's really neat when you get to be around people who are experts in those other layers because people of all sorts can just be the most delightful nerds, myself included. They're so passionate about little things that they know so much about, and just find it a delight to connect with those people and try and hear what they know and understand and use art as a jumping-off point to try and share that.MR: It's gotta be interesting to be able to express their nerdery about their specific thing in art, and then they see it and like, "Yeah, you get it." That's right. Maybe you even observe something because you're doing that art that they maybe didn't make those connections or maybe it sort of became clear for them. I imagine that's probably happened.MC-M: Yeah. Yeah.MR: That's really cool. Cool. Well, let's jump into what's the project that you're working on now that you're excited about to bring us right up to the present and share some detail.MC-M: Well, all sorts of projects going on. On the art level that's been something for my personal art practice that comes in and fits and starts now. I had a really lovely residency over the summer in Norway, which was an opportunity just to sink back into some of my painting practice. And so I'm excited to take some of that Norwegian work and develop it into larger paintings.I often like to work in the field, you work really quickly or might be filling up little sketchbooks. Here's an example from little small, just playful sketchbooks. I'm holding up one from some sketches in Alaska I did with a scientist that are—MR: Oh yeah, look at that.MC-M: Very much kind of little storytelling elements of about the project. Then in my studio I like to work on a much bigger scale often to try and catch some of the emotional sense of what I feel. Then on Art Toolkit side, there's all sorts of nonstop projects there, but I really enjoy developing new products and collaborations. I'll have to just share that there's some new paint-filled pallets that we're working on. We've got some variations on—oh, I don't even know if I should say yet, but if you stay tuned to Art Toolkit.MR: You'll find out. Yeah, get on the mailing list.MC-M: This spring, there's some a few things coming out that I'm really excited about.MR: Sweet. That's really great. That's great to hear. You're like me, you got lots of irons in the fire keeping things moving, so that's pretty cool.MC-M: Yeah. Yeah. I will say will be announcing our early spring workshop soon, and that's something I'm excited about too, is getting to connect with other artists who may wanna come and help inspire our Art Toolkit audience.MR: Excellent, excellent.MC-M: We'll have those coming up soon too.MR: Great. Let's switch to tools a little bit. You probably got lots of tools you could show. I guess we do have to remember this is typically about an hour show, so I'll have to cap you a little bit. But maybe you put in the context of someone's listening and they're like, expeditionary art or visualizing nature.Maybe they're in an urban environment and they don't think about nature, but the reality is nature is all around you, birds and trees, and it would be interesting maybe the start observing like, well, what nature is in my urban environment that I could capture? Or maybe I get out of the city and I take a sketchbook or something along.Maybe talk—when we talked before you were able to provide me with a little starter kit to try. Which is really great. Maybe talk about if someone's interested in getting into it, what would be the right tools that they might consider? Maybe that's the way to go about it.MC-M: Well, I think like the sketchbook it's similar to what people say about a camera, that the best camera you have is the one you have with you. The best sketchbook is the one you're gonna be able to have with you. For me, that's where having this little all-in-one zipper pouch of the Art Toolkit, which we offer in two sizes really came in because I just wanted this like no excuses kit.My no-excuses kit is usually the small one. I carry a bigger one when I wanna head out with more goodies and more things to share. But just to be really no excuses. In this kit, one of my favorite things is a water brush. I typically use Pentel water brushes. They're really durable. I find that you don't often clog. Last a long time. If you haven't used a water brush, you untwist the caps, you can fill them with water. Really cold places, you can mix it in with some vodka or gin to help lower the freezing temperature.MR: Your paint freeze.MC-M: Paint freeze. Another perk of the pentel that I like is they're oval, so they're not gonna start rolling downhill as quickly.MR: Fall into a crevasse or something.MC-M: I always find a water brush is handy. The most fundamental, all you need is a pencil or pen and a sketchbook. But I'll show you a little just what is in my kit, I suppose. I like waterproof pen. I often sketch straight with pen because there's just the immediacy of putting your marks on paper, and I really try and embrace practice, not perfection, of not worrying about lines being in the wrong place.If I did something and I stop and measure, I just draw the line where I want it and only color and the lines I want to. It's part of the process. Practice, not perfection is a really big mantra for me. I love a waterproof pen, and depending on where I'm traveling, I might carry one that's—I don't like disposable things in general, but a little Sharpie pen. Sometimes traveling refillable pens can be a little explosive with going over mountain passes or altitude. Another waterproof pen I really enjoy is this Pentel brush pen.MR: I love those.MC-M: A little more like dynamic mark, and they're also waterproof. Then I have a little collection of fountain pens. I'll sometimes carry—this is a little Pelikano fountain pen by Pilot. That's pretty cute and not too expensive too, so if you are not gonna worry about losing it too much. Copic multiliners are another waterproof pen I like. These are kind of a in between, see if I can pop this out. Something that is disposable and reusable. It's got a very large ink cart that you can replace and you can replace the nibs.That's a little variety of pens. I've got pen, water, brush. If I do carry a pencil, I sometimes carry an automatic pencil. This is a little heavy, but—oh, I love these pencils. Mike, they're Helvetica pencils. We have the automatic ones and then we also have just wooden pencils. They're just these gorgeous pencils made in Japan. I have just a gorgeous feel and I'm a real sucker for good aesthetics and I really like their aesthetics.MR: I'm a mechanical pencil fan as well. I keep usually soft lead and like thick. I think I got Faber-Castell, it's like 1.4 millimeter, so it's really super thick. I can show you what that looks like. It's super thick lead and it's soft. If I'm gonna do pencil, I want it to be soft and feel really loosey-goosey. I dunno if that's a technical term, but I tends to like, I can flow around and I don't worry so much. It's not about perfection, so.MC-M: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, this is one I bought years ago with a big lid lead too, that I don't sketch with very much, but I picked it up 'cause it was just so beautiful with a very big lead.MR: I think that's technically called a lead holder. I think it moves beyond a mechanical pencil to lead holder.MC-M: I think that serves it right.MR: The grasping things on it, right?MC-M: A couple other things In my carry-everywhere kit, if I've got enough time, I do really enjoy travel watercolor brushes. A brand that I'm a big fan of and we carry, Art Toolkit is Rosemary and Co. These are made in England by a small family company, not terribly small, they've grown many over the years, but Rosemary still runs the company. They have a whole variety of shapes and sizes, but the big key is that when you're done painting with 'em, you can take it apart and put a cap over the point so that they won't be damaged in transit.To paint with 'em, I carry a little tiny collapsible cup that we offer on Art Toolkit website. I can pour a little water and sit down a minute. Sometimes for my water brush, I carry a little tiny no-needle syringe to squeeze out the water and pop it in my brush. I always carry little extra binder clips, sometimes rubber bands too for wind. They're really useful because you can also clip your palette to your sketchbook. So, if you're out, you can have it on one side and sketch on the other.MR: Got it.MC-M: I do that a lot, sketching standing up, or making sure something won't blow away. Finally, a paper towel to wipe my brush on. The paper towels I use, I've been using these for years and years and years. They're shop towels, blue shop towels that you can pick up at a hardware store. They're just so soft and durable that you tease them out and reuse them. I really like the feel and trying to reuse them.MR: Cool.MC-M: That's what's in my daily carry. For folks getting started, your daily carry can just be as simple as like I said, you know, a pen and a pencil. I think water-soluble pens can be fun with a little water brush just for black-and-white paintings. Just keeping things simple with what feels like you've got space for in your daily bag.MR: Well, I've got my little toolkit right here for those on video so you can see. There it's. I got a little ruler in there, my syringe, and stuff. It's been a great little kit.MC-M: Oh, I'm so glad. I love having a ruler too. Mine has slipped out at the moment, I'll need to replace it.MR: Exactly. Great. I think I've actually done some work. I can show you what I've done. You mentioned the Pentel brush pen. I was playing with this. This is in a train ride in Minneapolis along the river with my kids. Then I think I was standing at the back in the caboose and just captured the tracks rolling away from us. I gotta say, it was really fun. I was really enjoying it. I need to do more of it this summer, so thank you again.MC-M: Oh, that's wonderful. You're welcome. That brush pen is so big and bold that you can capture the shapes quickly and then the watercolor can bring it to life. I think that's something a artist friend of mine told me once was that big tools make for big ideas. That sometimes bumping up the size of your tool, you can fill something up quickly and just—MR: Loosens you up a little bit too. I think. Talking about the size, if you know what the size of a pocket Moleskine is, which I don't know what the exact size is. The kit is not much bigger. Well, maybe I'll take a picture for the show notes. It's big enough to hold it and then the tools. It's actually pretty small, all things considered. Pretty compact, and you could throw that in a bag really easily. I appreciate little things from when I was a kid as well, so I super appreciated how you packed so much in this little tiny package. It fit me. It suited me.MC-M: Oh, I'm so glad. Mine tends to get a little bloated, but the zipper holds, so I'm like, "Oh, I can just stuff one more thing in here."MR: One more thing, just one more thing. That's excellent. Now, typically with Sketch noters, they often will use iPads and pencils and stuff. Are you using any kind of digital tools for the work you do? And what are they if you do?MC-M: I'd say the biggest tool I use is my phone in just taking reference photos. I might be out somewhere and I find like being onsite and doing some sketching sort of activates my attention. It gets me into just active observation, paying attention. It doesn't matter if that's just color studies or notes, but just something to pay attention and get outta my head.But then having some sort of media, additional media, let's say I'm going and need to add more color later or wanna work on some larger paintings, having a camera with me is really helpful. I think a phone is—I just have a little iPhone mini that—I'm not always looking for the best photo, but just for the reference and the memory.Sometimes I'll even do little videos, especially if it's of birds or things that move so that I can get a sense of that motion. I can pause and maybe catch a different position. I will say, I'm curious about playing more with Procreate tools and other things. I had on my residency this summer, another artist was doing a lot of really cool development of his photos into digital images and it was good to see the potential there. But I'm a fairly analog person by nature.MR: I can imagine. The problem that I've had in the field is just when you need a thing, the battery's dead. And if you're cold weather, it's dropping faster and if it's bright and sunny, it's hard to see. There's all these considerations that paper doesn't have those issues a lot of times. I could certainly see why that might be the case.But well, that's a really great little toolkit and we'll, we'll have you send a link to all those things. We can put that in the show notes, so we've got links to all the stuff that you showed, or maybe the package of things that have them all in there. Maybe there's just one link and everything is already in there for someone so they can just buy it and they're ready to go. So cool.Well, now let's shift again. We're shifting away from tools, and this is the tips portion of the interview where I frame it that there's someone listening, a visual thinker, whatever that means to them. Maybe they feel like they've been in a bit of a rut or they're on a plateau and they just need a little encouragement or some inspiration. What would be three things that you would tell them they can be inspirational, can be practical, three things that they might do to help them just kind of shake it up a little bit?MC-M: I love that question because I'm a real process person and I already told you one of my mantras, which is practice not perfection. Another one of my mantras is trust in process. No matter how much painting I've done, I still sometimes look at a sketchbook or start a painting and I'm like, where do I begin? And I need to remember kind of, warm up again.I love having my little process to get started. One thing I love in just all parts of my life, I love timers. I am so hooked on, like, does this feel hard to do? Set a timer. In workshops with people of all ages, I love going through gesture sketches, which are really fast, energetic little sketches to get the big idea of something.Using a timer, we'll so often, start with a ten-second sketch, go to a 30-second sketch, a minute, and even up to two minutes. It's fascinating to see what can be done in just a couple of minutes. let's see if I have a little example here of some gestures. Here's some little, just tiny walrus gestures done with one project.MR: Oh yeah.MC-M: I'd recommend as one tip is, if you're feeling like you need a little prompt to get started is set yourself a timer. I'm gonna do this for three minutes, just to get yourself to sit down and get started. Another way to think about it that a scientist shared with me is the activation energy to get a chemical reaction started is bigger often than like continuing a process.I think that timer can help us have that boost to get going. then once we are in the groove, it can be easier to stay in the flow. My first tip, Mike, is use a timer and set yourself a very small amount of time to do something. Now there's the question of what to do. And that will be my next tip.Another tip I would suggest is if you're sitting somewhere and feeling like, "I need a little boost for getting going here." Would be just to play with painting the colors you see and not worry about composition. You might do this as little circles. An artist friend of ours with Art Toolkit lately has just been doing some really delightful little circle studies, in this vein of creating a little bit of a little wet circle on your paper, dropping a little bit of one color in, and adding a little bit of another color.This could be more formal or you can see this little slouch of color on the other side of just seeing how colors might mix together what you see in front of you. But take away the pressure of I have to like, paint something or, or do something more, I'm gonna put this in quotes, "Official" or "Real feeling." Just give yourself the opportunity to play with color, what you see, and don't worry about composition.Actually, there's a fun thing which I think we put on our website. I can send you a link to this, Mike. If you do this of just mixing the colors you see, sometimes you can go on top and just do a light pen drawing on top of that as well. I can send you a link to a little prompt of that.MR: Okay.MC-M: My last tip would be going the other direction from just looking at color to just starting with words. I think a lot about sense of place and palette of place is something, as an artist I pay attention to. you're building a vocabulary when you're outside of the colors you see of the environment of the stories you learn. if it feels too much to start with the drawing side of things, let yourself do some writing.I often think about, you know, the W's of who, what, where, when, why when I write. I think it can be really fun to play, this is something you do so well. you might play with your writing. This is a little exercise I did on one program where we were imagining the ocean. So let your words be fun where you might play with how you're writing.Then around those writings you might then add in little tiny thumbnail sketches or little icons and then be able to add some color to the page. with all of these tips, out of those three, it's about just simplifying your approach. setting a timer, putting a little limit on kind of your time and expectations, taking away composition, just focusing on color, and then just paying attention to the world and just letting yourself start with notes just to start that attention.MR: Those are great. Those are three great tips. I almost wanna say practice not perfection and trust in the process are almost like free extra tips. I dunno. 0.1 and 0.2, I dunno, whatever. They are also good things to remember. That's really great. Well, here we are at the end of the interview. Crazy enough, it just flows by, it seems like every time I do these.Tell us what's the best way to reach you to get to Art Toolkit to follow you. Are there social media channels where you're more active? What are the best ways to connect and explore what you're doing and what you're offering?MC-M: Art Toolkit, we're at art toolkit.com and Mike, I'll put together a little discount code that you can share with your listeners at the end. We'll put in the show notes. We have an active Art Toolkit, Instagram. Fun community there. And I've got a small team Art Toolkit who helped me with that, which is great 'cause we really enjoy featuring other artists featuring techniques.We have an Art Toolkit recommend series where we just really try and share inspiration and cool stuff to try and help inspire each other. My personal art is over@expeditionaryart.com. I'm a little quieter on the social media front these days personally, but really with the Art Toolkit newsletter is the best place to hear about what is coming up. We announce to our newsletter our new releases or special offers first. We really enjoy that community and so invite you to sign up for that on our website.MR: Great. Those are all great entry points. Everybody listening, definitely check out the code that'll be in the show notes, and then go visit and spend some money over here. We wanna encourage and support Maria and her team for the hard work they're doing and the sharing that you're doing, and you end up with good tools. Everybody wins in that case.Thanks so much, Maria, for being on the show and sharing your experience and it's so good to have you on the show. Thanks so much.MC-M: Oh, such a pleasure. Mike, thanks for everything you do and your work has long been inspiring for me too. Just really glad to share this community, so thank you.MR: You're so welcome. Thanks so much. For those who are listening, this is another episode of the "Sketchnote Army Podcast." Until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon.