storytelling

Sketchnoting for More Than Robots

Cliff Manning runs More Than Robots. Focussing on the shifting intersection between ‘tech/youth/support’ the group consists of a stimulating newsletter and quarterly meet-ups. As I am mainly working from home as a high-school teacher in lock-down I was able to attend the most recent event via zoom. Cliff’s encouragement to contribute something initially left me a bit cold… but as we discussed mutual areas of interest I realised that creating a set of sketch notes would probably be the best thing I could offer to promote the excellent work represented by the attendees.

Here are the eight snapshots I created for most of the presentations:

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Some process footnotes:

  • as this was my first remote scribing experience I gathered as much source material as possible for later review. This included a variety of things - initial talk slides, audio, weblinks and screen captures for later reference/review, notes in my sketchbook.

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  • I agreed with Cliff beforehand that it was counter-productive to create facsimile drawn notes for everything being said - there were already slides that could easily achieve this - better to grab a few resonant moments and illustrate those in a useful, shareable way. Below - is a scan of my initial notes: the boxes in red denote areas that looked worth developing into something more.

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  • From here I used Clip Studio Paint on the iPad to compose something that I felt worked better.

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  • And then I dropped this into Procreate which feels like a better final inking solution for this kind of thing. It’s funny that the way CSP works seems facilitate thinking in a way that Procreate enables toddler bitmap art. If the project had required something more involved I would have gone further using Affinity Designer for polished hand-drawn vectors.


Thankyou to Cliff for letting me in to this group - it gave me a strong impression of how many serious-minded groups are trying to serve those who so often get left behind in society. If you are interested in using me as an illustrator/facilitator then please get in touch and we can discuss your needs.

How to make a 'simple' origami pyramid

I bought a ‘5 minute’ origami set from the bargain shelf at my local Waterstones this weekend. The guide it came with wasn’t good enough so I made a better one.


Process notes:

The original guide in the book wasn’t at all clear.

I went online and studied a couple of YouTube tutorials. Here is the one I found most helpful.

After practicing this one through a few times I decided I would sketch the stages for myself - as a way of learning the process. I ended up with 52 drawings. No wonder the original guide wasn’t clear enough!

I then tried to arrange and order it into some clearly defined sections - I ended up with five:

  • initial folds

  • diamond

  • kite

  • inner flaps

  • inflate

I opened up affinity designer on the Mac to do some laying out.

Finally I created an A2 image in Procreate and started sketching my original drawings into this composition, making a few tweaks as I went. Please feedback if you manage to successfully make the pyramid. The end inflation bit is quite difficult I think.