As part of my Working Out Loud challenge to become a graphic scribe, I recognised that I am absolutely hopeless at drawing. That is a bit of a challenge if you are aiming to charge for scribing in workshops. Now if I speak to graphic scribes, they always say that the drawing is not the point. Rather the listening and synthesising of the conversation are the core skills. As a trained coach and facilitator, those are not the issue areas, but rather the graphical outputs are. From watching scribes work, I have seen a variety of styles, but most, when rushing, seem to fall back to simple stick like figures that have some style and convey clear messages.

To build up competence and memory muscle, I know I have to practice, practice, practice. To help me with this practice and to create clarity between different messages or ideas that I will need to convey, I have decided to invest in a set of books developed by Martin Haussmann and Holger Scholz of Kommunikationsloten in Germany. These books, “The Bikablo” library, provide a visual reference for applying stick figures to visual scribing / communication. These books contain typical situations and ideas that are a basis for creating the more complex work of graphic scribes:

stick people bikablo style

`The books are distributed by Neuland and I think are a great addition for any facilitator, trainer or coach that wants to improve their capacity to draw. Here is my very first white board of some basic figures:

bikablofiguresonwhiteboard

I also want to vastly improve my sketch note making techniques, and so I am also drawing on paper:

bikablo for sketchnote

Eventually when I have confidence I aim to:

  1. Create a personal catalogue in Evernote of all of the Bikablo drawings and more. Similar to the idea of Sacha Chua
  2. Develop my skills to draw electronically, either on my Bamboo Fun tablet or on a tablet.

For now, it is just practice, practice practice. I think in a few weeks times I will have mastered, I hope, the basic form. This would allow to me get onto more complex “people”.

I am also saving resources on my Pinterest board “Graphics“.

Thanks for reading! Do you have any resources that you can recommend to help me improve my drawing ability?