The Teacher's Wellbeing Cycle
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…).
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
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:
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.
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.
From here I used Clip Studio Paint on the iPad to compose something that I felt worked better.
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.
Alex Morrison: Four Good Rules of Strategy
Alex Morrison is the founder/director of Cogapp and WiredSussex. His recent business strategy blogpost got my juices going so I made this. You’ll have to do some zooming in. Here is a full size download. My notes aren’t a substitute - the full post is essential reading.
