Thumbs up drawing how to#
Thumbs up drawing professional#

There is a significant body of Neuroscience research that supports the use of images, white space, layout etc, and by introducing doodles to my notes and communications I have achieved that. My intention was not to produce works of art, just a communication and thinking tool.

What was important to me was the ability to produce very fast, simple doodles. Through the use of the visual thinking alphabet, the reader begins by doodling simple everyday objects and progresses to more ‘advanced’ doodles. It was easy to understand, with short daily lessons that build understanding through daily practice. Having looked at several courses on the internet, I took Adam’s 40-day doodle course. My artistic skills are not so accomplished and I wanted a course that enabled me to produce doodles that made my notes more appealing and interesting (for myself and others).

Thumbs up drawing professional#

I use mind maps and sketchnotes in all aspects of my everyday personal and professional life. I also use doodles to represent ideas and share them with others.ĭoodling has become one of those surprising transformational tools that has changed how I think and express myself visually. I now doodle each day for brainstorming ideas, for taking visual notes, for solving problems, and for keeping my mind calm and focused. And yes, I found that confidence I was lacking years before in that meeting room.ĭoodling became easy, fun, and incredibly transformational.

Thumbs up drawing how to#

I, of course, played around with this for several months and progressively taught myself how to doodle. I couldn’t believe that it only took a combination of 12 shapes to draw anything I imagined. I watched the video from beginning to end and I was absolutely blown away. This visual alphabet is made up of 12 basic shapes that can be used to doodle absolutely anything your heart desires. In this video, he walked me through the visual alphabet. Then one day, I came across a video presented by Dave Gray. Drawing these shapes just felt easy and natural. But, of course, I didn’t realize it at the time that I was actually onto something. I had no confidence in my drawing skills, but I certainly knew how to draw shapes. Remember earlier the story I was telling you when I was asked in a meeting to express my ideas visually? Well, towards the end of that meeting all I was doing was drawing basic shapes like a circle, square, triangle, blob, etc. You will be blown away with uncontrolled enthusiasm once you figure out how simple and straightforward this process is. 🙂

Yes, I know it might be hard to believe that it only takes 12 shapes. In fact, after working with these 12 fundamental shapes for several years, I am convinced that I can doodle absolutely anything using only these shapes. But instead of forming words, I rather use them to form pictures and tell stories through my visuals. These 12 shapes are used in a very similar way. Just like we use the letters of the alphabet to create words, and then use those words to form sentences, paragraphs and entire manuscripts. I wasn’t sure, but I definitely wanted to find out. Could developing my drawing skills help advance my career/business? I imagined at the time what opportunities I was potentially missing out on because I didn’t know how to express myself visually on paper. I had an inability to get my thoughts down on paper in a visual way, which left me feeling awkward and miserable and left my colleagues feeling perplexed and confused. The worst part of all was that it was an absolute mess and nobody fully understood what I was thinking. And so I pivoted and started using circles, squares, blobs and words to represent what I was thinking. I really didn’t like where this was going. But soon enough my rudimentary doodles turned to silly awkward and disjointed shapes. In fact, sadly, I didn’t feel as though I had a single creative bone in my body, let alone my fingers. I do, however, pre-warn my colleagues that I’m no artist. 🙁īut I’m, of course, a risk-taker, and so I dive head first into my drawing. In fact, I think that sadly they might’ve even regressed. It seemed as though my drawing skills had not really progressed very far since kindergarten. But all I had in my arsenal of drawing skills were some not so fancy stick figures with absolutely no personality. One day in a business meeting someone asked me to draw an example of the idea I had in mind.