Hello and welcome to Verbal to Visual. My name is Doug Neill and today I'd like to share some things that I've been doing lately to become more and more comfortable with drawing - a daily habit that I've worked into my morning routine that helps me to slowly build my visual vocabulary over time and also serves as a bit of a warm-up to get me in the mode of sketchnoting, of visual note-taking, that I stay in for my work day.
And that's the specific type of drawing that I'll be talking about here. Not so much the artistic side of drawing, but more drawing for the purpose of taking notes on something that you're learning, or maybe drawing out a presentation that you're going to give. So here's a pretty simple three-step process that you can use to get yourself set up for this type of daily drawing habit. A good starting point that I've found to be helpful is actually giving yourself a dedicated space to do this daily drawing.
When I first started working this bit of daily drawing into my morning routine, I decided to get a new, somewhat special notebook. I picked up this large one from the local bookstore and decided to make it my dedicated drawing warm-up journal. And the size was important for me. In this notebook each page is 9 inches by 12 inches, and the way I use this on a daily basis is by filling one of those pages every morning. I use a large black marker to do that. I don't do any pencil sketches first, so the drawings are by no means perfect, but I do like them. And that actually brings us to step two in this process.
You'll want to pick a source material to pull from while you do these drawings. So for me, I'm not imagining these images here. I've selected a couple of sources that I like to use, to have a visual reference to look at as I recreate those drawings. One of my go-to's in that realm is a website called The Noun Project. It's a large collection of icons of varying degrees of complexity. Sometimes I just scroll through the latest and pick ones that I like and draw those, other times I'll try to find a particular designer with a collection that I enjoy and I'll draw from those.
What I like about using that as the source material is that in many cases that simplistic style of icon - those are the types of images that I enjoy weaving into the visual notes that I take. So there's a decent amount of transferability in terms of the types of images that I'm practicing drawing. Another source of things to draw is an app called Wordraw. That app simply gives you a random word to draw and I often will use that, in combination with a Google image search of that word, to find the style of it that I'd like to draw.
And for me, I like the randomness of it, of not knowing what word is going to come next. That kind of keeps it interesting, but I still get to choose via that Google Image Search, sometimes adding the word icon or cartoon after it, I get to pick the style of that object that I'd like to recreate in my drawing. So The Noun Project and that app are my current go-to sources for the things that I draw. Another thing that I've done in the past is actually use the outside world as source material, going on a walk and just looking for singular objects that I can draw.
And in that case I might use a smaller, more portable notebook. And that gives me the opportunity to practice viewing an object, breaking that real object down into relatively simple lines, and recreating that in my sketchbook. Right now, though, I like incorporating this drawing habit into my office space here, and into my consistent morning routine. And that brings us to step three in this process. I think it's helpful to pick a spot within your day to put this drawing habit. For me it happens early in the morning, kind of right at the beginning of my work day because I use it as a warm-up of sorts, just to get me drawing sooner rather than later since that's a big part of the work that I do, doing a lot of sketchnoting throughout the day, and also teaching sketchnoting.
So consider where in your day you might like to place this habit. When you have all three of these things in place: a dedicated notebook or space where you do your drawing, a set of source material that you can pull from, and a dedicated spot within your day to do this drawing - having that in place just sets you up for success, to actually establish and maintain this habit from day to day and week to week. And I've found that it's a habit that kind of builds on itself, partially because it's fun to look back through this journal to see the drawings that I've done in the past, to remind myself that this is a skill that I'm okay at and can keep developing, and that kind of gives me motivation to keep filling a new page each day.
I've also found that this notebook has kind of turned into a resource of its own, a resource that I can use when I start sketchnoting with new materials. For example, I'm spending more and more time using the iPad and Apple Pencil combination of tools. I've got a course that I'm working on that looks specifically at digital sketchnoting. And to increase my comfort with this particular tool set, it's been nice to reference those sketchbook pages and recreate some of the icons that I particularly like, those that I might be most likely to use in a future note-taking session.
And I can imagine the next time that maybe I choose to do some large-scale sketchnoting up on the wall, I can also turn to that notebook to find some images that I might want to draw, just to get comfortable standing and drawing on the wall. So in addition to continuing to fill that notebook with new images each day, I also see opportunities to use it as a resource in other contexts. And with that I encourage you to establish your own daily drawing habit, especially if you're interested in sketchnoting but maybe not yet super comfortable with the idea of drawing.
This is a way for you to kind of establish a baseline level of comfort with the act of drawing, to slowly build that skill over time and also to kind of prep you for the sketchnoting you might do later in the day or maybe even immediately after doing this drawing habit. It can help you overcome that hurdle of discomfort with drawing, get that out of the way so that you can then just focus in on the thing that you're sketchnoting. I hope that the three steps that I outlined here help you build that daily drawing routine into your day.
And if you would like a PDF download of a recap of those steps and also the examples that I've shared, then come check us out on Patreon. I'm actually doing kind of a soft launch of a new Patreon account specifically for these videos that I make about sketchnoting that to me kind of fulfill a different role than the courses that I make at Verbal to Visual. I enjoy making these kind of stand-alone lessons that allow me to address specific topics that might not fit into a particular course. So the idea with this new Patreon is to provide some follow-up resources connected to each of these videos to make it a little bit easier for you to put into practice the specific thing that I share.
These videos will continue to be free, but if you want to tap into those extra resources and also just to support the further creation of these types of videos, Patreon feels like a good place to do that. So go check that out if you want to kind of get in on the ground floor. I think in a couple of videos I'll do a more detailed description and kind of launch of that, but if your interest is already piqued then do go check it out. Thank you so much for watching this video, good luck building your own daily drawing habit, and I'll see you again soon. Till next time.
And that's the specific type of drawing that I'll be talking about here. Not so much the artistic side of drawing, but more drawing for the purpose of taking notes on something that you're learning, or maybe drawing out a presentation that you're going to give. So here's a pretty simple three-step process that you can use to get yourself set up for this type of daily drawing habit. A good starting point that I've found to be helpful is actually giving yourself a dedicated space to do this daily drawing.
How to Build a Daily Drawing Habit
When I first started working this bit of daily drawing into my morning routine, I decided to get a new, somewhat special notebook. I picked up this large one from the local bookstore and decided to make it my dedicated drawing warm-up journal. And the size was important for me. In this notebook each page is 9 inches by 12 inches, and the way I use this on a daily basis is by filling one of those pages every morning. I use a large black marker to do that. I don't do any pencil sketches first, so the drawings are by no means perfect, but I do like them. And that actually brings us to step two in this process.
You'll want to pick a source material to pull from while you do these drawings. So for me, I'm not imagining these images here. I've selected a couple of sources that I like to use, to have a visual reference to look at as I recreate those drawings. One of my go-to's in that realm is a website called The Noun Project. It's a large collection of icons of varying degrees of complexity. Sometimes I just scroll through the latest and pick ones that I like and draw those, other times I'll try to find a particular designer with a collection that I enjoy and I'll draw from those.
What I like about using that as the source material is that in many cases that simplistic style of icon - those are the types of images that I enjoy weaving into the visual notes that I take. So there's a decent amount of transferability in terms of the types of images that I'm practicing drawing. Another source of things to draw is an app called Wordraw. That app simply gives you a random word to draw and I often will use that, in combination with a Google image search of that word, to find the style of it that I'd like to draw.
And for me, I like the randomness of it, of not knowing what word is going to come next. That kind of keeps it interesting, but I still get to choose via that Google Image Search, sometimes adding the word icon or cartoon after it, I get to pick the style of that object that I'd like to recreate in my drawing. So The Noun Project and that app are my current go-to sources for the things that I draw. Another thing that I've done in the past is actually use the outside world as source material, going on a walk and just looking for singular objects that I can draw.
And in that case I might use a smaller, more portable notebook. And that gives me the opportunity to practice viewing an object, breaking that real object down into relatively simple lines, and recreating that in my sketchbook. Right now, though, I like incorporating this drawing habit into my office space here, and into my consistent morning routine. And that brings us to step three in this process. I think it's helpful to pick a spot within your day to put this drawing habit. For me it happens early in the morning, kind of right at the beginning of my work day because I use it as a warm-up of sorts, just to get me drawing sooner rather than later since that's a big part of the work that I do, doing a lot of sketchnoting throughout the day, and also teaching sketchnoting.
So consider where in your day you might like to place this habit. When you have all three of these things in place: a dedicated notebook or space where you do your drawing, a set of source material that you can pull from, and a dedicated spot within your day to do this drawing - having that in place just sets you up for success, to actually establish and maintain this habit from day to day and week to week. And I've found that it's a habit that kind of builds on itself, partially because it's fun to look back through this journal to see the drawings that I've done in the past, to remind myself that this is a skill that I'm okay at and can keep developing, and that kind of gives me motivation to keep filling a new page each day.
I've also found that this notebook has kind of turned into a resource of its own, a resource that I can use when I start sketchnoting with new materials. For example, I'm spending more and more time using the iPad and Apple Pencil combination of tools. I've got a course that I'm working on that looks specifically at digital sketchnoting. And to increase my comfort with this particular tool set, it's been nice to reference those sketchbook pages and recreate some of the icons that I particularly like, those that I might be most likely to use in a future note-taking session.
And I can imagine the next time that maybe I choose to do some large-scale sketchnoting up on the wall, I can also turn to that notebook to find some images that I might want to draw, just to get comfortable standing and drawing on the wall. So in addition to continuing to fill that notebook with new images each day, I also see opportunities to use it as a resource in other contexts. And with that I encourage you to establish your own daily drawing habit, especially if you're interested in sketchnoting but maybe not yet super comfortable with the idea of drawing.
This is a way for you to kind of establish a baseline level of comfort with the act of drawing, to slowly build that skill over time and also to kind of prep you for the sketchnoting you might do later in the day or maybe even immediately after doing this drawing habit. It can help you overcome that hurdle of discomfort with drawing, get that out of the way so that you can then just focus in on the thing that you're sketchnoting. I hope that the three steps that I outlined here help you build that daily drawing routine into your day.
And if you would like a PDF download of a recap of those steps and also the examples that I've shared, then come check us out on Patreon. I'm actually doing kind of a soft launch of a new Patreon account specifically for these videos that I make about sketchnoting that to me kind of fulfill a different role than the courses that I make at Verbal to Visual. I enjoy making these kind of stand-alone lessons that allow me to address specific topics that might not fit into a particular course. So the idea with this new Patreon is to provide some follow-up resources connected to each of these videos to make it a little bit easier for you to put into practice the specific thing that I share.
These videos will continue to be free, but if you want to tap into those extra resources and also just to support the further creation of these types of videos, Patreon feels like a good place to do that. So go check that out if you want to kind of get in on the ground floor. I think in a couple of videos I'll do a more detailed description and kind of launch of that, but if your interest is already piqued then do go check it out. Thank you so much for watching this video, good luck building your own daily drawing habit, and I'll see you again soon. Till next time.
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