About a year and a half ago I first heard the phrase “live illustration”. I was listening to a podcast by The Good Ship Illustration and one of the hosts mentioned that it was her specialty. She went on to describe it as drawing visual notes live at events to capture key messages and moments. Sounded very interesting…
A few weeks later I was up at 5:30am, bleary-eyed but ready for my daily hour of drawing. (One of the best habits I have formed!) At the time, I was doing the graphic design and copy-writing for a non-profit organisation working with Thai women and my head was full of icons and project diagrams. As I pushed my brush around, almost without thinking, I found myself doing more sketchy, painterly versions of the work I had being doing during the past few days: Thai women, icons for regulation, symbols for partner visas and massage.
I sent a photo of the sketchbook page to a friend with the comment “I wonder if there is a market for hand-painted infographics.” He replied with a barrage of photos from recent conferences, all showing the hand-drawn sketch-notes of professional event illustrators. Apparently, there WAS a market for it!
I started practicing. It was hard and my results were terrible. Not only was it hard to draw fast enough to keep up with the podcast I was listening to, my artistic abilities seem to dry up under the pressure and I was left with stick figures and scratchy words in a horrible mess. I could insert an image here, but I am too embarrassed!
Well, no surprises here, but practice helped. I read a great book by sketch-noter Ben Crothers and signed up for the course that the Good Ship Illustration brought out. That taught me a lot about structuring the layout and restraining myself from drawing everything. I kept drawing podcasts and the fact that I was obviously getting better was encouraging.
The trouble with podcasts, though, is that you can hit the pause button. So, I packed myself up and took myself to an evening presentation on “Women in war” by author Anna Larsdotter (“Kvinnorna och kriget” in Swedish). Just the fact that I was sitting in a room full of people who could, possibly, look over my shoulder and see what I was doing, was enough to make me really nervous. But once I got into it, it was fun. A challenge. A race.
Afterwards, I gathered my nerves and my drawing tablet and approached Anna to show her my work, like a little kid coming home from pre-school! Luckily, she was both lovely and impressed and gave me her email address so I could send her the finished image.
I kept practicing and noticed that my brain was getting better at coming up with metaphors and faster at putting it down on paper (screen). I did two more live events and had the same result – it was sweaty and nerve-racking but fun and the visual notes were well-received by the speakers.
In two weeks, I’ll be doing my biggest and longest event ever: a regional conference for a government body that works with water management. Eight hours of listening, concentrating, distilling and drawing. Not to mention trying to remember not to get a cramp in my hand or neck.
I’ve got a meeting booked in with the client so I’ll find out more about the content of the event then. In the meantime, I am sketching water-y things like marshes, eels, creeks, oysters, dams, PFAS…
Click here for more examples of visual notes in English and Swedish. There’s also a good FAQ section if you’re curious about how it works.
