The usefulness of drawing isn’t new news.

But our recent visit from Matt Ward really brought the possibilities of drawing and doodling to the forefront of my mind. I found it a great way to express initial thinking and ideas without having to articulate them in words and a great way to express ideas I didn’t know I had. It’s a way to get something out of yourself, put it, unfiltered, on a page and then see what you’ve got.

(image by Mike Rohde on Flickr)

I’ve always looked to other people’s sketchnotes with envy like the above by Mike Rohde, the ever amazing sketches from the Queen of Sketchnotes, Eva-Lotta Lamm, or the lovely notes from Made by Many.

Something Matt expressed when he was here (and something I’m gradually coming to terms with regarding my own drawing talent) is that you don’t have to be good at drawing to be good at drawing. It doesn’t have to look beautiful to work for you and serve its purpose. It’s more about confidence and making definite lines on a page. The turning point came for me when I stopped using pencil and dove right in with ink.

Since Matt’s workshop I’ve been doing a little digging to check out what other people have to say about drawing, and as a sort of movement it’s gaining momentum with events like this month’s The Big Draw, a month-long campaign for drawing with events all over the UK.

A nice place to start for some examples of thinking visually is this SXSW presentation by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, Austin Kleon and Mike Rohde.

I like her new definition of doodling: “to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think.” An important (the most important?) part of drawing and doodling is to figure things out; to make mistakes and try different ways of doing things.

There’s also something nice about the physical, tactile nature of drawing, which I think comes out in this short BBC clip consisting of artist interviews on drawing:

My favourite quote from the clip is, “It’s not a record of a place, it’s a record of me standing in front of a place”, which for me sums up how and why drawing is so useful in trying to understand something. It goes without saying that when you draw something, you have to really look at it. And likewise when you’re drawing around an idea you have to really think about it. But because of the element of playfulness and fun that often comes with drawing, you sort of trick yourself into really looking and thinking without realising it. You just play the game of putting something on the page.