Pencil Me In Read online

  Pencil Me In: The Business Drawing Book Who Can’t Draw

  © 2017 Christina Wodtke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be addressed in future editions.

  ISBN 0-9960060-3-6

  Designed by Michel Vrana / michelvrana.com

  Published by Christina Wodtke / pencilmeinthebook.com

  With Contributions From

  Amelie Sarrazin, Aleksandra Micek, Taylor Reese, Dan Brown, Daniel Cook, Kate Rutter, Eva-Lotta Lamm, Matthew Magain, Sunni Brown, Cristina Negrut, Daryl Meier Fahrni, Marc Bourguignon, Laura Klein, David Gray, Melissa Kim, Jherin Miller, Mike Rohde, Brian Gulassa, Andrew Reid, Rolf Faste, Raph Koster, Stone Librande, Robin Hunicke, Alicia Loring, Erin Malone, Stephen P. Anderson, Giorgia Lupi, Alex Osterwalder, Noelle Stransky, James Young, and Dan Roam and examples from scientists, architects, chefs, architects, best-selling authors and more....

  Dedication

  For the students of California College of the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies and my many workshops who kept asking for this book.

  For my amazing beta-readers, who were generous with their time and feedback.

  But mostly for my daughter Amelie, who drew with me, critiqued the pictures and the words, and astounds me every day with her insights and creativity. I love you, kitten.

  Contents

  Copyright

  With Contributions From

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Drawing, Drafting, and Doodling

  Equipment

  A History of Mark Making

  Reason to Draw No. 1: Communication

  Reason to Draw No. 2: Better Problem Solving

  Dan Brown on Drawing to Solve Problems

  Reason to Draw no. 3: Remember Better

  Part 1: How to Draw

  Are You Afraid to Draw?

  Start with Lines

  Exercises

  Practice Making Shapes

  3-D Shapes

  Shadow & Texture

  Exercise

  Draw to Relax.

  How Bad is Your Handwriting?

  Personalize Your Alphabet

  Exercise

  Become a Fan of Good Enough

  Exercise

  Let’s Make People!

  A Better Stick Figure

  Hands

  Faces

  Part 2: What to draw When

  Hard Problems Take a Better Kind of Thinking

  Make Sketchnotes to Listen and Remember

  What Should You Learn to Draw?

  Fancy Sketchnote Elements...

  Draw Your Customers

  Empathy Maps

  The Customer’s Story

  Customer’s Journey Storyboard

  Drawings You Need for Storyboarding

  Draw Concept Sketches and Diagrams for Better Brainstorms

  Draw Your Ideas!

  Concept Sketches

  Map All the Concepts!

  Model Your Ideas

  Examples from Game Design

  Stone Librande

  Daniel Cook

  Robin Hunicke

  Draw When You Are Creating New Products and Services

  Three Useful Diagrams for Digital Product Design

  Drawing Interfaces

  Drawing Devices

  Erin Malone

  Alicia Loring

  Make Complex Ideas and Data Make Sense!

  Giorgia Lupi on Drawing Data

  Dave Gray On Visual Thinking

  Hold a Visual Meeting

  James Young

  Techniques for Visual Meetings

  Canvases Shape Thinking

  Put the Techniques Together and Hold a Design Charette

  Alex Osterwalder on Why He Works Visually.

  Dan Roam

  Draw All the Things

  Books I Read and You Should Too

  Websites & Communities

  Introduction

  While I was writing I kept thinking, “Who am I to make this book?”

  I studied painting in Art School and went on to have a great career in fine dining. Frustrated and footsore, I taught myself HTML and got into “this new internet thing.”

  That worked out pretty well.

  My parents used to tease me about how I was (not) using my degree. Over the years, I’ve realized they were wrong. There are so many things I learned in art school I use every day. For example, I learned grit, a.k.a. “How to keep making art after a critique had you weeping so hard you puked.”

  Drawing was one of art school’s greatest gifts. When I was at Kansas City Art Institute, drawing was taught as a kind of Zen practice. You were taught that your idea of a face or a house got in the way of truly seeing it. You needed to stop thinking about what it was and relax into seeing what really was there.

  For example, on the left is an idea of a house, the kind a kid draws. On the right is a house in my neighborhood. Houses rarely look like the one on the left.

  When I started making websites in the ’90s, I found plenty of use for drawing. I made concept models, site maps, wireframes, and more! But I made them with software rather than with a pen and paper.

  Much later, I realized that I was better off if I drew my ideas. I could explore a dozen ideas in the time it took me to open my software.

  I drew at every company I worked with, from Yahoo to The New York Times. At tech companies, everyone draws on the whiteboard. When you make complex things, words eventually fail.

  My sketches were pretty horrible. I knew how to draw things in the world, but not the things in my brain. I decided to learn how to draw ideas.

  Me, Teaching, by Amelie, Age 8

  I could have kept drawing badly –you can make bad pictures and communicate a lot! But I wondered... if bad pictures communicated a lot, what could good pictures do? I filled a dozen sketchbooks exploring and practicing. As I became fluent in visual communication, it was like learning a new language. I could communicate complex ideas clearly and simply.

  Index card sketches by Aleksandra Micek, student at California College of the Arts

  When I became a professor, I taught my students how to sketch ideas and model systems. One day a student came up to me and asked, “Is there a book on this kind of drawing?” All I could recommend was Ed Emberley’s Make a World. It’s a kid’s book.

  Where are the simple books on how to draw for grown-ups? Most books that teach drawing are intimidating. They teach you how to draw buildings or race cars or realistic people, but that’s not what non-designers need to draw every day.

  I decided to make a book for working professionals that wouldn’t scare anyone away and would teach you how to draw the kinds of things you need to think through product and business decisions.

  Here we are! Let’s draw!

  Drawing, Drafting, and Doodling

  People talk about drawing and sketching as if it’s all the same kind of thing. But when I tried to draw my ideas, I struggled, even though I had studied painting.

  I think there are three kinds of drawing (at least!).

  Life Drawing

  The art of looking at the world and shutting up your verbal brain so you can draw what you see. The best book for this is Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

  Technically, an extinct bird drawing.

  Drafting

  Used by architects and industrial designers, you use geometry and logic to render things as they eventually will appear in the world.

  Idea Sketching (Also Called Doodling)

  All about getting the stuff in your head out on the paper where you can see, evaluate, and share it.

  This book is about that last kind.

  Equipment

  You will want a pencil, a pen and paper. I started with Sharpies and index cards. But Sharpies bleed through normal paper!

  My favorite brands now are Micron and Tombow. If the pen’s product description says, “archival ink,” you won’t get in trouble with fading (or accidently washing).

  When I get a new set of pens, I always test each size, to see how I feel about the lines.

  My first notebook was a Moleskine. They’re in many stores, so they are easy to find. Now I use HandBook Travelogue and MUJI notebooks. MUJI are so cheap you feel good about making bad drawings! HandBook has the nicest paper, when you feel artsy.

  My secret weapon is stencils. I love them for making geometric people.

  A History of Mark Making

  We have been drawing for over 40,000 years. It’s how we preserved our knowledge before writing.

  Our brains have evolved to make and read pictures. So why do

  we stop drawing after the first grade?

  Little children and early civilizations make the same marks.

  They all start with handprints.

  Handprint… and marks.

  Then we make scribbles, enjoying the pleasure of mark making for its own sake.

  Scribbles become spirals and shapes, and shapes are refined into patterns.

  As we play, w
e discover new cool patterns we can make.

  We graduate into drawing the things we see in the world. We can’t help but include how we feel about the things we draw.

  Finally, we start drawing our work life.

  Petroglyphs from New Mexico, Arizona, Peru, Spain, Australia, Syria, New Hebrides, Mesopotamia, Oregon. Sketched from First Drawings by Sylvia Fein.

  Great people have been using drawing to make sense of ideas throughout history.

  Marie Curie thought in words, numbers and scribbles.

  Merce Cunningham, famous choreographer, worked out his dances on paper.

  Reason to Draw No. 1: Communication

  Words are abstract. When I say “chair,” what do you picture?

  Maybe neither of these?

  If I asked you to buy a chair, how would you know what to get? Better draw a picture!

  Michelin three-star chef Michel Bras uses drawings to communicate to his pastry chef exactly how his cake should look (from The Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts). M. Bras mixes words and images to make sure his team understands what he wants, and thus he keeps his three-star rating.

  M. Bras sketch from The Notebooks of Michel Bras

  Noelle Stransky, UX strategist, uses sketches to work through early ideas with her clients. Sketches invite non-drawers to join in, scribbling and annotating.

  Taylor Reese, UX designer at Devfacto, draws pictures of key ideas during meetings. Draw what people say and everyone knows you’re talking about the same thing.

  Reason to Draw No. 2: Better Problem Solving

  Have you ever been stuck when trying to figure out a problem?

  It’s hard to visualize all the details of a solution while simultaneously remembering all the parts of the issue.

  But when you draw, you get things out of your head and into the world where you can see them. Hang your pictures on the wall to act as an external memory!

  Throughout this book I’m going to have guest essays from people who using drawing in their work.

  Here is the first one!

  Dan Brown on Drawing to Solve Problems

  Dan Brown is a founding partner in EightShapes, a Washington DC-based design consultancy. He is also the Author of Communicating Design, Designing Together and Practical Design Discovery.

  Concept model: full (above), detail (right)

  “A client challenged me to model a concept central to their business. We sought to improve the technical infrastructure for this concept, which they called rules engine. The final model displayed three actors as circular “swim lanes,” though perhaps “concentric wading pools” is better. The engine sat in the center of these, a hub through which information passed to each of these actors through different software components.”

  “I dug up my initial sketches, which reveal how I came to understand the domain as well as modeling it. Each iteration added something different.”

  “Drawing pictures helps me get my head around a new idea.”

  Reason to Draw no. 3: Remember Better

  I love listening to presentations, but I struggle with a couple of things:

  1. Attention: It’s hard to focus! What’s happening on Twitter? Is that a squirrel outside?

  2. Retention: I get inspired by a TED talk one week and can’t remember it the next one!

  Doodling helps. People who doodle remember 29%1 more information than those who don’t.

  Sometimes during a boring lecture I draw abstract forms just to quiet my mind. But if you want to get even better at listening, understanding and retaining information, try sketchnoting.

  When you sketchnote, you draw pictures of the ideas you hear or read. More on page 79!

  * * *

  1. Andrade J. 2010 ‘What Does Doodling do?’ Applied Cognitive Psychology

  Are You Afraid to Draw?

  No one expects to sit down at a piano and play Chopin without practicing. So why do you expect to draw wonderfully without doing your scales?

  Like any skill, from piano to basketball, you have to practice.

  You will suck for a while.

  But not forever.

  Start with Lines

  If learning to draw is like learning to play piano, then lines are our scales.

  Do them every day.

  Begin by drawing lines in sets of five. Go in both directions, up and down.

  Try to make the lines equidistant. Try to make diagonal lines, too.

  Play with drawing the lines very close to each other, and very far apart.

  Overlap your lines to make grids. If the lines are equidistant, you’ll make tidy squares.

  Try making lines very long.

  Fill pages with lines during boring meetings.

  Exercises

  Listen to a song, and let your pen dance to it!

  Practice Making Shapes

  Start with boxes.

  Let’s think about how we make a box. Do you draw it all in one go, not lifting your pen up? Is your last line sloppy?

  Play with different ways to draw them. Draw the vertical lines equidistant, then the horizontals.

  Try drawing two L shapes. Does a certain technique make a better box?

  Are you more accurate when you pull or push the pen? Left to right? Right to left?

  Try to make small boxes and big boxes, but always stay square!

  From here, you can try making rectangles.

  Next try circles. Circles are really hard to draw… if you rush.

  Go slow!

  Keep circles tidy. Make sure the end point neatly touches the beginning point.

  You don’t want your circles embarrassed because the other kids at school say they are funny looking.

  Finally, triangles. Making a triangle isn’t as hard as it looks.

  Draw a line. Mark the midpoint. Make a dot above the midpoint where you want your point. Now all you have to do is connect each end with the dot.

  Practice your triangles. Make sure you close the corners!

  Sierpinski triangle, fractal fans!

  Arrows are just rectangles and triangles together.

  Or sometimes a triangle and a circle.

  3-D Shapes

  Sometimes you need to make things 3-D. For example, if you wanted to draw a package.

  For a cube, draw a square, then half a square behind it. Connect the corners.

  For a pyramid, the triangle’s bottom line gets a point as well.

  Spheres don’t have hard edges to suggest 3-D surfaces. Give it a reflection, or consider shading.

  Shadow & Texture

  You can use lines to fill in shapes to create an illusion of shadow and depth.

  In hatching, lines go one way. In cross hatching, they are perpendicular. Stippling is made with dots. Scribbling is scribbling. But thoughtful scribbling!

  You can make the texture shadowy two ways. Lines that are closer together look darker.