storytelling

The Teacher's Wellbeing Cycle

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The school I work at gave everyone the option of a day doing other activities. This was ours! Little did I realise that blowing your nose during a cycle is a bad move for the people behind you (sorry Mike - what can I say? I am an amateur and I have heavy nostrils…).

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A few process notes

For those of you who have been here before this should come as no surprise but here are the usual stages outline in the snapshots below.

  • Gathering raw materials (I also had a few photos but I thought I’d spare my friends the shame)

  • Some biro/sketchbook notes for initial thinking and shifting basic ideas about

  • Clip Studio Paint for first tidy pencils

  • Affinity Designer for vectors (moving back and forth between my iMac and iPad to get the best of the different input methods¹)

    • initial inking

    • shade

    • colours

    • layout

¹ Apple Pencil is the best way of drawing. The bigger iMac screen with a trackpad/mouse is a lot better for organising and arranging compositional elements - especially when it comes to the millions of layers that vectors produce).

A few screenshots


Sketchnoting for More Than Robots

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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.