I've been giving myself more time to just enjoy drawing: not trying to untangle a thought, just wandering around and seeing where the lines and colours take me. While looking for examples of sketchnotes for self-facilitation for my post on finding the shape of my thoughts, I came across Sketchnotes: Changing The Way You See Your Thoughts — Creative Soul of Denise Nicole. I liked the ABC exercise near the bottom. For fun, I copied the same words and tried my own spin on things.

Text from sketch

Visual vocabulary practice - ABCs 2025-09-21-04

• anchor
• banner
• calculate
• DNA
• energy
• freeze
• guitar
• height
• Instagram
• judge
• kid
• ladder
• meeting (A+ drew the details)
• network
• obstacle
• planning
• quote
• repeat
• scroll
• think
• universe
• volley
• weight
• x-ray
• yo-yo
• zoo
• extra: jar
• extra: light

When A+ saw what I was doing, she asked me to swap out my meeting icon from "people around a table" to her online meetings at virtual school. She even added details: "This is the kid with the Minecraft background, this is the kid with big headphones…" I enjoyed watching her in this state of playful focus. I wonder what else I can draw that she might have fun taking over. "Meeting" is my favourite one in this set, but since that's mostly A+'s, my next favourite is "freeze." Canada gets even colder than -20C, but for me, -20C is definitely stay inside weather.

I've also been enjoying Kamo's books, like How to Draw Cute Doodles and Illustrations. Her style reminds me of the Illustration School series by Sachiko Umoto, which I also liked. I think I tend towards simple and approachable rather than realistic or technically impressive. Learning how to draw concrete things might help me get better at drawing abstract things. It's fun to slow down and pay attention to more details, too. Turns out I'd been drawing guitar holes in the wrong place all this time. Now I know!

Related posts:

• Sketchnotes: Building my visual vocabulary (2013)
• Building my visual vocabulary: Breaking down other people’s sketchnotes into component parts (2013)
• Sketchnote lessons: Stick figures (2013)
• Six ways I’m learning how to get better at drawing sketchnotes (2012)
• Practising drawing: variations on a theme (2011)

Here are some other resources that might be helpful:

• Sketchplanations - Simplifying complex ideas in sketches - This is amazing and Jono keeps coming up with more.
• Icon Practice and Building Visual Vocabulary - by Amy Cowen - also check out the rest of Amy's blog
• visual frameworks – A language of patterns - great for visual metaphors
• The Noun Project - useful for getting unstuck
• Bikablo visual dictionaries and learning tools (there's a quick flip-through of Thinking with Your Pen)
• 5 Ways To Build Your Visual Vocabulary - YouTube (7:03)