A lot of people know about Scribing – there’s a brief explanation on my website here.

There’s a lesser-known but incredibly powerful type of live illustration, which also happens to be my absolute favourite type of work, and that’s supporting ideation, innovation and change during meetings and workshops with rapid marker sketching. It’s engaging and fun but it’s also a humungously effective tool for rapid ideation or getting to the root of a problem.

I’ve done this with big businesses and tiny charities, with consumers and internal teams, as one-off sessions and within longer projects to support product / service development or to catalyse change.

It works like this: People invent a product or service, or describe a situation, and I draw a picture of whatever it is right away, usually in a few minutes, but sometimes in seconds.

It could be something concrete and physical, like a new type of teabag, or something less tangible, like a TV show, a customer journey or reward system. It could be as simple as a packaging adaptation or as complex as a theme park based on the history of hot drinks (yes, these are all real examples of ideas I’ve drawn in workshops). It could be a depiction of a situation at work, possibly followed by another drawing of how things could look in an ideal world.

I crystallize whatever these outputs are into simple drawings which convey the central concept at a glance.

I can and do create these illustrations digitally, but there are specific benefits to working with markers. Nothing says that creative work has taken place like a room with dozens of drawings on the walls and an overflowing bin. Drawings can be displayed or passed around to be discussed, ranked, built on, written on, selected for further development or crumpled into a ball and thrown away. They emphasize that ideation is rapid, iterative, collaborative, special and worthy of everyone’s full attention, because almost everything else that anyone does takes place on chairs in front of screens.

I’m not always just a conduit for other people’s ideas in this role, but it’s hot, it’s humid and the weekend’s almost here, so I’ll go into that properly another time! In the meantime there’s a little more information about workshop illustration here.

P.S. – Talking of iteration, I did a first pass on this drawing with extremely light marker (COPIC C-1, pen fans), which is how I usually work IRL as an alternative to pencil. It doesn’t show up very well on my phone camera and made for mystifying viewing. But generally I start with a light colour and work towards a darker one, refining the drawing and deciding what should be foregrounded with darker lines as I go! Look at the standing person’s feet – completely wrong in the first pass and slightly improved in the second one.