Category: Uncategorized

Hier ist die deutsche Version des Artikels

Last week I was invited to speak at Berlins Creative Morning. If you don’t know the format, it’s a lovely little series founded by Tina Roth Eisenberg in New York. The chapters take part all over the world, you can go there for free, chat a little, have a coffee and some inspiration and then go to work. In Berlin the lovely team from Monotype and Jürgen Siebert are organizing this event for quite some time now. I’m a frequent guest, but was also one of the speakers of the early Creative Mornings (if you are interested, you can watch the video here: The German B).

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A while ago I saw Eva Lotta Lamm doodling some funny illustrations that reminded me of the Kaleidoskop that I loved so much back when I was a child. You can find them in her Flickr Stream. Then I got myself an iPad Pro for digitale Sketchnotes and finally I tried it! And what can I say – what a lovely time killer it is!

Amaziograph App

It is the perfect app if you just want to doodle and calm down a little. It’s surprisingly relaxing to just see where your lines go. I didn’t find anything useful to do with it yet but it is so much fun to just start and see where it leads to. I’m not a very good three dimensional thinker so I’m having a hard time to get where Eva Lotta gets with her illustrations but it is so very much relaxing to just doodle!

Go and see for yourself!

»Amziograph« 1,99 Euro on the App Store

This week I stumbled upon two posts about pencils and oh … they are so wonderful to look at! On is this one from the New York Times: Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories and oh, it’s so wonderful!
Did I mentioned that I love pencils?

❤️ ✏️
Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories (via @marloesdevee) https://t.co/3Qy5Iv9PVX pic.twitter.com/4A1PUZxS4P

— Nadine Roßa (@nadrosia) February 5, 2018

The other on is this video explaining why the pencil is so perfect. But have a look yourself. Pure pencil porn!

What is World Sketchnote Day?

January 11 is World Sketchnote Day. Yes, there is a Sketchnote Day. Mike Rohde (Author of the Sketchnote Handbook) and Mauro Toselli created that day a few years ago. It’s about empowering people to sketchnote and united the community for a day. What you do is up to you, sometimes there is a topic to deal with or just some meetups. Read More

As I can’t stress enough to mention, you can use sketchnotes to visualize basically everything. I always wanted to use it for a song, so this year I decided to sketchnote a christmas song. I wanted to sketch one of the not so boring ones like Silent Night (Sorry!) and so I ended up sketching Jingle Bells. That was actually quite an interesting thing to do because I really learned a lot about it. Like: It was not intendend to be a christmas song in first place but more of a sleigh race song. And if you listen to the lyrics you see, there is not much mention of christmas or holidays in it. It is more about sleigh crashs and picking up girls. Funny thing though: People barely ever sing the other three verses.

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Hoho! Ever wondered how you can draw a christmas tree very easily! I got you covered! Here are three simple ways to draw a christmas tree. Go and draw!

1. Christmas tree using triangles

Use triangles in every size and shape to draw a simple christmas tree. The more triangles you pile, the bigger the tree! Makes sure that the lower triangle is wider than the on on top!

2. Christmas tree with lines

Christmas trees with lines are so simple! Just make your line wander, either in a zickzack way or like a spiral. Start small and go big. Voila!

2. Christmas tree around a trunk

You can also add single lines like waves, angles or zick zacks to a line (=trunk). Start small to big!

Now add a star to the top and if you like some sparkle with circles! Merry Christmas!

The fabulous Mike Rohde, creator of the word Sketchnotes and author of the Sketchnote Handbook(Affiliate) just published a wonderful Mini-Sketchnote Workshop that covers all the basics you need to know to start sketchnoting.

Wonderful, thanks for sharing Mike!

International Sketchnote Camp in Hamburg

Last Saturday I attended the International Sketchnote Camp. You read right – there is a Sketchnote camp. I was actually the first gathering of that kind and oh how nerdy it was! In a good way!

The camp was organized in the Barcamp format which is sort of a self-organized conference. That means everyone can suggest a topic and give a session, just step up in the morning, present your topic and find a time-slot.

I arrived a little late because I took an early train from Berlin to Hamburg so I missed that part. But I wasn’t planning on giving a session anyways (I would have loved to but there was simply no time to prepare one. Maybe next time.)

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I’ve recently stumbled upon this article on Medium about how to start with drawing by Ralph Ammer. Very good read!

Copyright: Ralph Ammer