A Line with Confidence

(Ironhack Visual Note Taking Exercise)

Sketching is Difficult……

Mainly because sketching doesn’t ask for your perfection, nor does it demand all of your time. Sketching just asks for your honesty, and that was a little hard for me. I need to force myself to be honest with what I really think so that the idea appears on the page in a simple straight forward manner.

During this exercise I watched a TED video with the goal sketching the main ideas that I found most important or pivotal within the talk. I felt I was able to catch (and remember) the biggest concepts that the speaker was discussing. I decided to watch the video twice so that I could focus on just putting pen to paper more quickly.

First Watch (on the left) and Second Watch (on the right)

I used a copic pen to sketch and write because I wanted to avoid erasing every single thing that I didn’t find appealing on the page, and I have been trying to make drawing a daily habit so I want to figure out what pens feel different. I felt better about the second set of sketches, but noticed that I didn’t fill the page that much more. I also had different things pop out to me the second time depending on how quickly I finished an idea on the page and chose the next topic to sketch out. I also think that after looking at beautiful sketch work by individuals who had been working for a while I didn’t take as many liberties the first time for fear of a product not coming out anywhere near that level — yes I have ridiculous standards from day one.

I would like to be able to really work on improving my sketch work because I think about things differently than when I do traditional notation. Here are a few things I think could focus on to improve:

1. Don’t think of the best symbol to draw just use the first symbol that comes to mind and keep listening.
2. It is okay to use common symbols and language. Everything at this moment doesn’t have to be hyper-personalized.
3. Have different type of tools to mark the page to show stylistic differences in ideas like pencils and pens with different colors.
4. Text is just as good as a picture if you can be concise.

I am excited to become comfortable with my mistakes so that sketching starts to feel more natural to me.