Live illustration and sketchnotes examples for your next online event.

No more boring death-by-Zoom meetings, ok?

Ok.

Good.

I wanted to create this blog post to answer some of my most commonly asked questions, namely:

What is a live illustrator?

What is graphic recording?

What's a live scribe?

What are sketch notes?

People have so many questions and they don't actually know what I do. So this hopefully will clear it all up for you!

This is what it looks like when I’m live illustrating online. Live illustration = being able to watch 90 minutes of an online conference in 90 seconds. This is creative ingenuity mixed with straight-shooting business logic...and it’s seriously cool. Right now I’m mostly scribing online, over Zoom, and other video conference options.

I spent over 135 hours at online events and virtual conferences. Here’s what I learned.

Tips for illustrators who’d like to enter the world of live illustration. ‘How do I become a live illustrator/scribe?’

• Draw from life as much as you can. The more time you spend developing your skills and going to art-gym, the better.

• Build up a visual library. A lot of the time, information will be flying at you very quickly and it’s beneficial to have a stock library of icons and images that you can quickly pull out of your brain.

• Get used to drawing in fro…

In March I travelled to Birmingham to create some illustrated meeting notes for an NHS conference about the mental health workforce.

Earlier this year I was thrilled to be asked to create some painted boards to celebrate 10 years of the Royal Society of Biology (RSB) in London. It was an exciting illustration commission to start with, but when I learned that DAVID ATTENBOROUGH was going to be at the event where my work was displayed I nearly fell off my studio chair.

This Friday at 8pm GMT The Good Ship Illustration (Helen Stephens, Tania Willis and I) are doing a live draw-along on Instagram.

We created the Sketchbooker’s Friend, a free audio drawing guide for drawing indoors… and this Friday is the perfect time to try it out at the same time as lots of other artists, all over the world.

This comic is available in Welsh and English, and there are a few different versions you download from this blog post. Thank you!

Silver Linings 🌈
In the last few days 80% of my live illustration work has been postponed
BUT
I’m not worried. And here’s why you don’t need to be either. (Sent with lots of affectionate elbow taps and Japanese bows)

It’s that time again! Diving into the results from the 2020 Illustrators’ Survey.

TL;DR CHARGE MORE SO YOU CAN HIRE A THERAPIST IF YOU NEED ONE. (Sorry notsorry.)