You've started sketchnoting and/or graphic facilitation and want to maintain or improve your graphic style. Here are three simple tips.
"Being able to continuously improve your graphic style over time is one of the key skills for practicing visual facilitation successfully". This sentence opens the chapter on "Improving your graphic style" in my new book "Pro en facilitation visuelle" released in French a few weeks ago.
Here we're going to look at 3 techniques: simple doodling exercise, mini sketchnotes and a 15 minutes drawing routine.
Simple doodling techniques
Whether in a moment of silence or while listening to music or the radio, this technique allows you to refocus, to experience a moment of "flow" and to improve the quality of your drawings. It's important to slow down the graphic gesture, to live in the present moment by filling a page with geometric patterns, pictograms or lettering ideas. Here's an example.
You can also get inspired by this video showing us some fun doodling exercices:
Mini sketchnotes
These are sketchnotes with limited content, with no ambition to be shown to others or published. A simple, creative capture of ideas. This enables us to deploy the techniques inherent in sketchnoting, without pressure of time or quality. They can cover as little as half a page or a full notebook page. Using colour is optional. They can also be created using a digital tool such as a tablet. Here are a few examples.
The 15 minutes drawing routine
Similar to doodling, this technique involves regularly practicing certain graphic gestures: straight lines, oblique lines, regular strokes, circles, ovals and a few pictograms that you want to be able to execute easily. Here's an example of a graphics routine.
Conclusion
These three techniques are simple and easy to use. But if you want them to have a real effect on your graphic style, you need to keep them alive (by renewing the lines and graphic ideas) and, above all, practice them as regularly as possible.
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