I've had my SuperNote A5X for a month now, and I really like it.

Text from my sketch

I use it for:

• untangling thoughts
• sketchnoting books
• planning
• drafting blog posts
• drawing

A- uses it for: (she's 6 years old)

• practising cursive
• doing mazes and dot-to-dots
• drawing
• reading lyrics

Things I'm learning:

• Exporting PNGs at 200% works well for my workflow. I rename them in Dropbox and upload them to sketches.sachachua.com.
• Carefully copying & deleting pages lets me preserve page numbers. I use lassoed titles for active thoughts and maintain a manual index for other things.
• Layouts:
  • Landscape: only easier to review on my laptop
  • Portrait columns: lots of scrolling up and down
  • Portrait rows: a little harder to plan, but easier to review
• Many books fit into one page each.
• Google Lens does a decent job of converting my handwriting to text (print or cursive, even with a background). Dropbox → Google Photos → Orgzly → Org
• Draft blog posts go into new notebooks so that I can delete them once converted.
• The Super Note helps me reclaim a lot of the time I spend waiting for A-. A digital notebook is really nice. Easy to erase, rearrange, export… It works well for me.
• Part of my everyday carry kit

Ideas for growth:

• Settle into monthly pages, bullet journaling techniques
• Practise drawing; use larger graphic elements & organizers, different shades
• Integrate into Zettelkasten

I put my visual book notes and visual library notes into a Dropbox shared folder so that you can check them out if you have a Supernote. If you don't have a Supernote, you can find my visual book notes at sketches.sachachua.com. Enjoy!

W- was happy with his SuperNote A5X, so I ordered one for myself on July 18. The company was still doing pre-orders because of the lockdowns in China, but it shipped out on July 20 and arrived on July 25, which was pretty fast.

I noticed that the org-epub export makes verse blocks look double-spaced on the SuperNote, probably because <br> tags are getting extra spacing. I couldn't figure out how to fix it with CSS, so I've been hacking around it by exporting it as a different class without the <br> tags and just using { white-space: pre }. I also ended up redoing the templates I made in Inkscape, since the gray I used was too light to see on the SuperNote.

It was very tempting to dive into the rabbithole of interesting layouts on /r/supernote and various journaling resources, but I still don't have much time, so there's no point in getting all fancy about to-do lists or trackers at the moment. I wanted to focus on just a couple of things: untangling my thoughts and sketching. Sketchnoting books would be a nice bonus (and I actually managed to do one on paper during a recent playdate), but that can also wait until I have more focused time.

I've had the A5X for five days and I really like it. Writing with the Lamy pen feels like less work than writing with a pencil or regular pen. It's smooth but not rubbery. I've still been drawing in landscape form because that feels a little handier for reviewing on my tablet or writing about on my blog, but I should probably experiment with portrait form at some point.

So far, I've:

sketched out my thoughts

I used to use folded-over 8x14" to sketch out two thoughts, but scanning them was a bit of a pain. Sometimes I used the backs of our writing practice sheets in order to reduce paper waste, but then scanning wasn't always as clean. I really like using the SuperNote to sketch out thoughts like this one. It's neat, and I can get the note into my archive pretty easily.

sketched stuff from life

This is easier if I take a quick reference picture on my phone. I could probably even figure out some kind of workflow for making that available as a template for tracing.

received many kiddo drawings

A- loves being able to use the eraser and lasso to modify her drawings. Novelty's probably another key attraction, too. She's made quite a few drawings for me, even experimenting with drawing faces from the side like the way she's been seeing me practice doing.

received many kiddo requests

A- likes to ask me to draw things. She enjoys tracing over them in another layer. More drawing practice for both of us!

used it to help A- practise coding, etc.

A- wanted to do some coding puzzles with her favourite characters. I enjoyed being able to quickly sketch it up, drawing large versions and then scaling down as needed.

played a game of chess

I drew chess pieces just to see if I could, and we ended up using those to play chess. I should share these and maybe add other games as well.

referred to EPUBs and PDFs

I put our favourite songs and poems on it. I've also started using org-chef to keep a cookbook.

doodled sketch elements

boxes, borders, little icons, people… Probably should organize these and share them too.

I've figured out how to publish sketches by using my phone to rotate them and sync them with my online sketches. Now I'm playing around with my writing workflow to see if I can easily post them to my blog. At some point, I think I'll experiment with using my phone to record and automatically transcribe some commentary, which I can pull into the blog post via some other Emacs Lisp code I've written. Whee!

A- wants to be with me almost all the time. This can be challenging.

A multiple-choice question is easier than a fill-in-the-blank one, especially when it comes to "What do we do now?" A- seems less grumpy throughout the day when she can go from one activity to another of her choosing. I like letting her take the lead. I also like not having to come up with stuff. During bedtime, I sketched this menu:

A- wants to learn cursive, probably because it's extra-fancy and the sort of thing Elizabeth Bennet would have done. There's some support for teaching cursive in kindergarten, so it's not totally crazy. It's a good opportunity for me to improve my lettering skills, too. She usually likes it when we do the same thing at the same time, so working on letters together is a good way to nudge her to practise fine motor skills. We did a brush lettering worksheet for "Aa" from Amy Latta Creations. This one is my worksheet.

I've got lots to learn about controlling a brush pen. Doing lots of drills will probably help me get my up-strokes to be as thin as the samples.

A- often asks me to connect my letters. I think I'll make our own worksheets so that she can connect letters too.

At bedtime, I drew in my sketchbook while she read independently. When she noticed what I was doing, she said she liked the 3D letters and encouraged me to do more. She pointed to blank spaces on the page and suggested things to add.

Not that different compared to my lettering experiments from 2013:

But hey, I'm learning stuff!

A- loves being read to. She picks up new words and ideas from the books we read, requests both favourites and new books again and again, and can identify objects in photographs and drawings. I borrowed a few children's books from the library in case reading about upcoming changes or challenges helps her understand. The books were okay, but didn't quite fit the words we use or the way we like to handle things. So this week, I decided to make my own books for A-, especially since there are few books that cover things like microphthalmia.

The first book I made was about night weaning, since we might have to do that in preparation for dental surgery under anaesthesia. I sketched it using ZoomNotes on my iPad, exported the SVG, tinkered with it in Inkscape, exported PNGs, combined the PNGs with ImageMagick, and created a 12-page PDF with 7″x8.5″ pages. That let me print the book out on legal-size paper (8.5″x14″), 2 pages per sheet, duplex printing set to flip on the short side, using this page order:
12, 1, 2, 11, 10, 3, 4, 9, 8, 5, 6, 7. I folded each sheet in half. Instead of hand-sewing the binding, I just taped the pages together. And just like that, I had a book that I could page through properly: “No More Nursing, Time to Sleep.”

I read the new book to A-. She asked me to reread it several times. She pointed to the book and said, “A-!” She pointed to the stick figure for me and said, “Mama!” Success!

The next thing I wanted to try was printing in colour. We recently replaced our printer with an HP M277dw colour laser printer that could print duplex, so I was looking forward to giving that a try. I wanted to make a book about the conformer in A-‘s little eye. This time, I drew the pages of the book using layers in Medibang Paint. I drew on the bus home from Riverdale Farm, working around a sleeping A- snuggled in my carrier. I exported each layer as a PNG, used ImageMagick to convert pairs of pages into what I needed to print (page order: 8, 1, 2, 7, 6, 3, 4, 5), combined those into a PDF. I couldn't figure out how to get the HP app to properly scale the document and print in duplex, but printing from Linux worked fine. I quickly had another book in my hands: “My Conformer.”

She's starting to echo phrases from the to books, and it's been only a few days. Wow!

I'm working on a third book now. Time for something fun: “Let's Make a Smoothie,” since she enjoys making and drinking them. She already knows all the words, so this is more about enjoyment. This time, I'm going to make a workflow that lets me draw on two-page spreads. I don't have any wide drawings planned yet, but it could be handy for later. I made an Inkscape template to help me keep margins in mind. I learned how to use Medibang Paint's folders to organize all the layers, and I'm getting the hang of digitally tracing and painting the photos I took.

I'm looking forward to making even more books and refining my workflow along the way. Here are a few things I want to try:

• Flat colour
• Painting
• Programmatically adding text
• Printing photos
• Two-page drawing
• Parametric templates
• Smaller format by cutting
• Programmatically adding photos
• Heavier-weight paper
• Board book replacement
• Printing at Staples or similar
• Print-on-demand book
• Handstitching
• Binding with a cover
• Smaller format by folding and gluing
• Mobile workflow
• Vector drawing

And a few quick ideas for possible next books:

• Potty Time
• Brushing Teeth
• Feelings
• When I Feel Nervous
• When I Feel Sad
• Going to Sleep at the Dentist
• My Life
• My Day
• Going Out
• At Home
• I Can…
• I Can Draw
• Waiting
• Try Again
• Dressing Up
• Alimango sa Dagat
• Leron Leron Sinta

Over several nursing sessions, I flipped through all 750+ of my sketches from 2016 on my phone. It was a quick and wonderful overview of the past year. It’s amazing to see how much ground we’d covered one day at a time.

Taking 5-10 minutes at night to draw a visual journal worked out well. It was my second year with daily/weekly/monthly sketches, and my workflow held up to the demands of caring for a newborn. Some nights I fell asleep before A- let me sneak away, but the text notes I jotted throughout the day helped me reconstruct events even after several nights. I really liked having a record not just of what happened, but also what I was thinking about, and the little moments that would have been hard to capture in a picture. When we were dealing with lots of uncertainty, thinking out loud helped me untangle my thoughts and feel like things were manageable. Looking back over the past year, I think I like the person I was and the person I’ve grown to be.

I didn’t have much time or energy to dress up my sketches or go beyond a simple style. It was nice to see the sketches I spent some time colouring for presentation, though, and the drawing practice I occasionally indulged in. My copies of characters from the books I read to A- reminded me of those stories, and rough sketches of her (mostly sleeping, since that was the only time I could draw from life) made me smile. I think I’d like to make more time for drawing, not just capturing thoughts.

Still, it was so useful to have a tool for making sense of my fragmented thoughts. There was so much to figure out about parenting, time, uncertainty, anxiety, boundaries, philosophy, plans…
I found it easy to go through my sketches and remember what it was like at that point in time. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what a cryptic note on my sketch meant, especially if I didn’t cover it in my weekly review, but that’s okay.

I’m looking forward to continuing this habit in 2017. I’ve been experimenting with jotting down sketch ideas on my phone, so I can move more of the thinking out of my limited computer time. I’d like to make sure I play with more formats than just lists, though, since the nonlinearity of drawing can support thinking in a different way compared to writing. It would be nice to mix in more non-journal sketches, and more actual sketches and drawing exercises too. Maybe a daily cycle, to prompt me to expand…

I still haven’t finished my yearly review, but having all those weekly and monthly sketches sure made the process easier. Onward!