Transcripts
1. Introduction: I challenge you to pick up
a piece of paper and pen, maybe a phone application, and draw something,
anything, right now. I'll wait. If this challenge
made you shutter, then you're part of a
majority of people. Most of us are terrified of
drawing anything on the spot. Every time I ask someone to explain something to
me and sketch it out, there'll be apologizing
every few seconds, even though they're making it much easier for me to understand the directions to a place or the layout of
a house interior. Now if you're
anything like this, we're going to change
that through this class. Hey, I'm Winter,
I'm an architect, writer and visual artist residing in Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia, right now. I had gone to
architecture school where we were
trained to flesh out and communicate our ideas for designing buildings
and urban plans. After graduation, it
felt natural for me to apply these same
communication principles to illustrating writing, making explainer videos
for causes I believe in and teaching others
how to do the same. I've worked with
NGOs, companies, and associations to
create animations explaining the visions
and project progress. Some of these videos
were made with sand, while others were made
in a simpler style that I'm about to
show you right here. I worked on socially
conscious design prototypes and urban plan designs as well. But no matter what
project I worked on and whether I worked on
it alone or in a team, it always started with
a single drawing. My work requires me to
communicate my ideas and others ideas as clearly
and simply as possible. Making drawings of any kind in the early steps helped me and my team have active and
efficient collaborations early on and throughout
the process. In my experience,
a quick drawing can often ensure that everyone is on the same
page about an idea better than any number of words. I believe that anybody
can communicate an idea with a piece
of paper and a pen. A drawing is not
something that only those that were deemed to
be gifted artists, or those in the design
field can make. Nobody has a
monopoly on drawing. Whether you're a
restaurant owner who has a perfect
menu list in mind, an entrepreneur with
a new business plan that you want to
share with clients or members of your team, someone who wants
to design a house or a student working
on a presentation, this class is perfect for you. In this class we'll go
through some of the basics to help you draw to communicate. After talking about
visual communication, we'll work on our
first exercise, drawing basic shapes
that you could frequently use in your
concept drawings. Here I'll share a few
examples of when shapes are used to depict abstract
ideas effectively. In our second exercise, we'll make a few
quick sketches of some animate and
inanimate objects. These exercises will set us up for the final class project, where we will make
a drawing following the routine we expect
to lead tomorrow. Finally, I'll show you a few
more examples of drawings I made for other purposes, and you can use these
to expand on the skills you pick up in this class
and to use for inspiration, making your own drawings. The goal here is to
think of drawing as an extension of
your vocabulary and to use that to capture
and communicate your ideas. So let's get to it. Shall we?
2. About Visual Communication: Now, before we talk
about the class project and exercises that lead to it, I wanted to talk a little bit about the background
for this class. I believe the need to
draw and communicate is an innate urge that we've
inherited a long time ago. Some of our ancestors
had left us with their visual
expressions in the form of cave paintings
that have survived that long after their
eras have passed. Through these depictions, we can tell that they
were trying to capture a lot of the things that still exists in our environment today. A simple drawing can easily transcend the barriers
of language and culture, and I Find that fascinating. I feel like the style that
I've developed over the years emulates the essence of
those cave paintings. In that I only try to
include enough detail or information so the person
who's looking at it can tell what I'm trying to copy
from the world around us. I think that this style or combination of techniques that I'm about to show you
now is very easy to pick up and ideal for use
in many situations. Now, the reason I believe that communicating something
through a simple drawing rather than just talking
about it can be superior is because when you explain
something to someone and this has happened
to me a lot. The image that you have in your head while you're talking and explaining this information or story or concepts to someone, can be very different
from the image that they ultimately
form in their heads while they are receiving
this information. I think this is
why professors in architecture school
forced us to explain our ideas through
a concept diagram from the very beginning. Even if we were trying
to explain it verbally or trying to explain
it some other way. Since we humans are heavily
biased to visual information, being able to communicate
visually is going to give you an edge
in many contexts. I believe that the
best way to approach this is with a
childlike attitude. As kids, many of
us scribbled all over a piece of paper
without much thought. It was just the thing
that gave us joy in a way for us to
express our imagination. In the following exercises
we're not going to be wasting much time on
any specific drawing, we'll only be focusing on
communicating an idea. In the next lesson, we're going to go through
our class project and then we're
going to go through the exercises that
will lead us there. See you.
3. Class Orientation: For our class project, we're going to be visualizing our tomorrow in a
way, but before that, we're going to be
working on two exercises where I'm going
to be introducing some very basic shapes
that you can use as visual elements for
your final class project. After your class project, we have a bonus exercise or a bonus lesson
where you can pick up some more ideas and
inspiration for expressing more complex
ideas from here on. For this class, we're
going to be using anything you can draw with, a pen marker, any medium that you're
comfortable with will do. A piece of paper and optionally something
you can color with. If you want to take
the digital route, then feel free to use
some of the resources that I've left in the projects
and resources section. You can use these visual
elements as you like as we go along the
rest of this class. The purpose of these exercises
is to help you warm up and to help you pick
up a few elements that you can then add
your visual vocabulary. Then this can help you
become more comfortable with executing the
class project. In the next lesson,
I'm going to be sharing some examples
of very simple drawings that were able to
express abstract ideas. We're going to be starting
our first exercise. See you there.
4. Exercise 1: Abstract Shapes: [MUSIC] Welcome back.
In this lesson, I'm going to be sharing
some examples of simple visual representations
that I find inspiring and then we're going to be
diving right into making our basic shapes for
expressing abstract ideas. I wanted to share these
examples with you because I find them
quite inspiring whenever I'm drawing
some concept diagram or turning an idea into an
abstraction on page. Now, the first example I'm
about to share with you is based on an old experiment called, The Bouba-Kiki Effect. Now this is based on
us humans tendency to connect names
to certain shapes. I'm going to show you
a couple of drawings. Look at this one
and then this one. Now, if I was to tell you, you have to assign
one with the name Bouba and the other one
with the named Kiki. Which one would be a Bouba and
which one would be a Kiki? But if you've picked this
as Bouba and this as Kiki, then you are with the
majority of people. Now the Bouba-Kiki
Effect was first documented by Wolfgang Kohler, I'm not sure if I'm
butchering his name, in 1929, by using gibberish
words as an example. This experiment is about the
connections we make between speech sounds and visual
shapes of objects. This experiment has shown
that the majority of people across different age ranges
and cultural backgrounds, have chosen the same things. I think that while making
some visualizations, we can use these
human tendencies to associate certain ideas or sounds with certain shapes or drawings to our advantage. Now, I tend to use this idea in some of my concept drawings. Smooth, bubbly shapes feel friendlier and more
like suggestions while rigid geometric shapes
feel more assertive and unruly scribbles show
some messiness and chaos. Here are a few more
examples for that. Now Greg McKeown's book
cover; Essentialism, works so well in giving you a good idea for
the book is about, and it talks about, among other things, sorting through the
clutter in our lives and minds to focus on the
few, most important things. The scribbled,
jumbled mess turning into the smoother or
loop around the word, just captures the soul of
the book very well for me. I think this is why
Rodrigo Coral's book cover design for John Green Turtles all the way down
works very well too, because the single bold
orange spiral shape, which partially covers
the texts on the book, depicts someone spiraling
or losing control. Even with abstractions,
we seem to have a common or shared
sense of what it might look like or what vibe
it would give on paper. I'm going to show a
little bit of what I mean through what we're
about to do next. I just need you to
grab a piece of paper and you're drawing tool, coloring medium if you
have one, let's get to it. Now that we've gone through
some of those examples, I just want to show you the abstract shapes that I use very frequently in
my concept diagrams. I'm going to be picking up. This is my current
favorite marker, but you can pick
a thick pen or I also use this one quite
a lot, this Copic Ciao. I also bought this one from local stationery and it's thick, I think locally made marker. This has a chisel tip. But I tried to stay away
from those diagrams because I like that
round tip effect. [NOISE] So I'm going
to be sticking to this one for this example. I just want to
fill out this page with the different abstract
shapes that I use. If this is your first time
drawing free-hand like this, you feel a little intimidated
by the size of the sheet. I recommend you dividing it
in half and cutting it up. I've noticed that
using sketchbooks with smaller pages usually intimidates
me or scares me less. This is something you can do. Even if you end up
making the worst drawing humankind has ever seen, you'll only have sacrificed
an A5 sheet or even smaller. If you want, you can cut it
into an even smaller sheet. You can even draw on
a very small corner on a post-it note on an index card and this is just to get you comfortable
with this kind of drawing. I usually leave the titles to the end because I
usually don't when I'm making a concept
diagram or when I'm trying to communicate
through drawing, I don't have an exact idea of what words or phrase will
sum up my final drawing. But right now I'm going to
be calling this my abstract. I like to do this flare
with an I. I like using all caps letters to
capitalize all of my writing because even
in architecture school, using capital letters or capital writing was encouraged
because if you're going to make a quick
concept sketch with some key writing and pin it up, it would be very easy
to read from far away. So it's very legible,
very functional. I think architecture focuses on functionality a
lot and I've carried on with some of the
traditions that I've learned there or some of the ways
that I've picked up there. This abstract shapes list, I will just start it with lines. Mastering your lines
or being able to draw confident lines is
very important in how you end up making concept
diagrams and you becoming very confident with
free-form shapes in general. I like to exercise my line drawing once in
a while because it's a very easy way to start and it's just a way to spoil the paper so I don't feel
precious about it anymore, and then I can
really get to work. This is something you can do. You can vary your lines just as practice of
what we're about to do. These little differences of
the kind of lines that you use and whether there is a
dash or gaps in-between, what line it is. You can translate that
to the shapes and other abstract objects
that we'll be drawing, and that's going to add these
little variations that adds interest to your work. There are infinite number of line shapes or lines
that you can use. I would also probably, just for reference,
leave this one in here. This is a thinner line and
I'm going to be showing you swatching my
thick chiseled lines. I'll probably use this one
for making these big arrows. [LAUGHTER] I'm not going to use it in this
class I believe, I'm not sure yet. Another thing that I like
to do is draw arrows. It's the same concept as lines, but you just end them
with an arrow shape, arrowhead in the end. You would do this as many
times as you feel comfortable. I feel like it adds this
going through a journey, this whimsical element
to your drawings so I like using my
arrow is quite a lot. I even like making it a bit too extra. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to call it that. I'm not going to fill
it to the very end. I like leaving negative
space in my concept diagrams because I feel it makes it a lot less underwhelming
for the viewer to see. The entire purpose or to me, the strength of
communicative drawing or concepts drawing, concept diagram making
is the fact that you can leave that
level of interests. This is still a rough
draft to the viewer, so they wouldn't be
scared to even make their own changes to go in there on your piece of
paper and maybe be like, oh, can we do this though? This especially
helps with clients. If I'm going to draw
something quick with clients or making
these first sketches, having an abstract or a concept diagram that's
still feels rough enough, but has enough detail to communicate what
I'm trying to say, gives the client the
freedom or they feel at ease to give drastic
suggestions and changes, and be able to propose
that knowing that this is still an idea in
development and this is still just work in progress. This would be my lines. Now, I would like
to show you how I make one of my most
frequently used shapes, which are blogs or bubbles. It's going to be like, I will probably use
straight lines right here. Maybe just underline
it a little bit. One thing that I like to do with these bubbles is to vary
their shapes a lot. It still feels very fun and whimsical but if it's a
bit more efficient then I would probably just stick
to these safer shapes. Let's say you're
going to talk about the development of the
concept that goes from something very rough and very amorphous looking
to something that is essentially a circle or something that is fully formed and you know what
to call the shape. Then maybe you would
just go for something like some very fun
shape like this and then you would draw an arrow to lead it to something
that's a bit more defined. Then have another arrow and lead it to a more
circular looking shape. Another thing I like
to do is maybe add these little flares
in the middle so that even when I'm going to write inside it frames the
text a little better. I'm just going to
call this Bubble 1. Another thing I like to do
is to hatch my diagrams. I feel like maybe
this is something that it's a very
broad generalization, but I think architects
don't like to color and the hatching
things just like, oh, we don't have
time to color it. It's just being too
cool to color thing. We hatch a lot little diagrams for something
that you see. You probably noticed
that there are all these different
hatch patterns. Of course, they have
purposes in drafting, but we also use these, end up taking them to
our sketches. Do this. Use dots. [NOISE] This is just
something that you can use to add interests
or fill in some of the shapes that would
be otherwise empty. One another thing
that I use a lot is the thought speech bubble. It's essentially an oval. I also use speech
bubbles quite a lot. So it's basically like the
clouds that we do when we were kids, like this. Then I would have a
smaller cloud right here, and then I will have a
third cloud right here. Another thing I like
to use is these parks. I feel I use these for
depicting an idea that came or I could even
fill it with text. I tend to color these
or to fill them in. For the speech bubbles, I could use this to convey
communication or speech, sounds and I can even fill
them with question marks, exclamation marks, just to show confusion or anger reactions. A thought bubble can be filled
with all sorts of things. It can be filled with a memory or some abstraction
of a moment and idea. It can have all sorts
of things in here. I like to use them to group visual elements within a
larger concept diagram. Other shapes I like to use are spirals to show
storms or something. So they would probably be a person's head in
here or something. This can even be inside the bubble to show that
this is in someone's head. I will draw the person
here or something. I like using sparks and to signify or to show
ideas and things of that sort. I also like using
scribbles and things. This is also the same
idea as the spiral, just to show a mess or
something of that sort here. Then I like using the
good old fashioned boxes, this would lead to another. I like to overlap the lines. Another thing that I took from architecture school is because I feel it gives this confident, one line this confident
look to your sketches. So I don't like connecting
lines from one point and keeping on going until
the last point is I have a starting point and an ending point whether
I mess it up or not, but it's going to be one line. That gives this impression of a confident quick sketch
to your diagrams. I like to vary line weight. As you can see, I'm
using the thinner points inside the box, and the thicker one would
be on the exterior. I like to use this
quite a lot to add that dynamism and the visual
interests to what I'm doing. Let's say maybe I can
make this solid black. Sometimes I don't like to color it all the way because
if you like to gives it that sketchy
quality, do not do that. I feel like we can use the same Bouba/kiki
experiment concept to these concept
diagrams because as you can see these more of a rigid
geometric shapes or give a completely different idea or impression to these blobby, bubbly, fun whimsical shapes. We can use these according
to the context or the feeling that we're trying to convey with our
concept diagrams. This can give us different
options and we are trying to relate different
messages, different types. In the next one
we're going to be drawing animate and inanimate objects that I use
quite frequently. For now, we're going to
be keeping this away and we're going to
be returning to it for the next exercise. [MUSIC]
5. Exercise 2: Animate + Inanimate Objects: This may be my favorite part. Now after you're done with
the main information, you could attach a few
visual elements to make your diagram more
memorable and pretty. This is what will give your
diagram that all factor, and we'll be drawing some
animate and inanimate objects. Some of which we'll be using for the class project as called for. One event that showed
me the power of just a very simple sketch
was in a cycling event, it was a gathering where people from different sectors
were in the same room, we were supposed to
look at the progress made in the cyclic
sector here in Starbuck, they're trying to make
Starbuck a more cyclable city. But the problem was
that right now, there are a lot of things
getting in the way for that, a lot of resistance
and so we were trying to figure out where
the problems are, where the progress made is. We were all divided into
different groups within that meeting room
and the people that I worked with were all cyclists. I don't know how to cycle, I forgot how to cycle
since I was a kid. What I was doing was just
taking note of everyone's ideas and complaints about
this project and I was taking it down in
my phone notes app. Once I was done with that, I went to the next
table and sketched out visual forms of those
bullet point ideas. For that context and
in the 10 minutes that we had to have
those drawings made a very big difference in how well we were
able to communicate our presentation
and it made it feel a lot friendlier and
a lot more hands-on. Our group was the only one
where we had these visual so accompany points that
we were trying to make. The sketches were
not detailed at all, but it helped us
back up our point. I think that in
situations where you can make these visual
representations or aids you can really help you stand out and to look very engaged and like you know
what you was talking about in many contexts. Here I'm going to
be showing you some of the animate and inanimate
objects representations that are used very frequently
in my concept diagrams. But you can draw inspiration
from everywhere, whether it's emojis or symbols that we see
on the streets, things that we're already
familiar with to simplify that even more and add that
to your visual vocabulary. I'm going to be starting
with my animate objects. For animate, once it's usually
humans that I will draw, but I want to include maybe
a cat and a dog in here. I like to depict people standing
in different poses here. I'm just going to be writing
animate and inanimate. I'm going to be showing
you how I draw people. This is my main trick, and it's again, something I picked up from
architecture school. I loved this quantity a lot, all you have to do is just use a basic upside-down circle or an upside-down
u-shape and then add two triangles and a tiny circle on top and you have a human. That's it. We can add
some variation to this, you can probably add
someone with a dress. I'm going to make the
circle go little, so it looks a bit
like a popsicle, the curve and maybe add a
little effort to this one, and you have a human, I guess. You can also draw like a cat, this is going to be a huge cat, because I want to be able
to show what it looks like. It has its ears, its tail, and its tiny body.
Its a big body actually, it looks quite big. But, then again, I
encourage messiness when it comes to
making these drawings. It's the whole point,
it's communicative, it's rough, it's catchy, so it's got to have that charm. I'm going to be slowing down just to show you what I mean, you can have this popsicle
shape and then you're going to add two upside down legs and you're going
to end it this way. I just wanted to show this
as someone who's holding, let's say a leash. I have left too little
space here, but it's okay. Just going to go there. I like using markers here because it gives me
less of an excuse to stop and rub or
erase mistakes. This gives you the confidence to slowly end up being
able to be comfortable with your mistakes and with
the mess that you make because there's a time
and a place for detailed, perfect drawings
and this is not it. I'm just going to draw a ground, I like to ground
my characters or my animate objects because I
feel they need that usually. I would just throw
either a small ground like this and it's usually
going to be little bit thicker than the
rest of the drawing. I'm just going to be between
this and much thicker, but it gives the idea. I like to leave it taper
off the end, like this. This would just be the person
with a leash and a dog, maybe she has an afro or
something of that sort and something like this and maybe I'm going to
just add some color. Add this color,
block it like this. I'm going to maybe add a few
splashes here and there. The thing about
making these drawings is you can adjust it
according to scale. Now, this one is relatively big, so I want to add a
few more details but even if I size it down, you can still tell what
I'm trying to draw. That's the whole point of
these rough representations. It's good because
you can scale it to look really tiny and huge, and it'll still mean
the same thing. You can draw this on an A1 sheet or a board
in front of students, for example or you're
presenting something. Or you can do it for your own journaling purposes and live note-taking purposes, you can use the same tricks. This is something
that I like to do and one more thing
that I feel like a magic trick to me sometimes because I would just
do the same thing, but I'm trying to show
a group of people, so I would not stop. I have a bunch of upside down u's attached to each other and then I would go back and do
the same thing I did here, except I would draw it for all of these people. Some of them would
be wearing skirts, for those that are wearing
skirts I would do this going back inside
situation, the line thing. For those who are
just wearing pants, I'm just going to draw the upside-down triangles. Then we have a group of people. I'm just going to add
their heads, tiny circles. Maybe I'm going to
give her an afro, maybe I'm going to
give him a cap. We have our group. I'm just going to add
the ground beneath them. This is it, this is
my group of people. Later on, I might fill them in with colors or a single color. These are the animates objects
that I tend to draw a lot. For my inanimate objects, I usually deal with
concepts like education, ideas of books,
processes that involve creating a digital product or a film something
of that sort. The inanimate objects I use
a lot would be a light bulb. I will just use this
to convey an idea. Spark. But I can also use the abstract shapes that I showed you the
previous exercise. I also use the pen quite a lot. I'm going to color it black. I also use the book sign to just be like a slanted
rectangle like this and I would add the book cover maybe I would make it go a little outside the
boundary just to show what it looks like and
have some writing in here. Again, I try to avoid writing
at all costs because I feel it ruins that abstract feeling. All I would do is just scribble something that looks
like writing and maybe for this one I can add a pen and then maybe another
thing that I use a lot. This view can convey, let's say packaging or
something delivered, something packed, a gift, all things with just a box. Again, I'm using
varying line widths to show this hierarchy. Whenever I'm drawings
any interior details, like you saw with the
light bulb interior, the title of the book,
and these little details right here. I will just be using
the final tip. Again, you can go
inside your phone, inside your emoji section and I would recommend
that you just pick up a piece of paper
and continue with this exercise by seeing the
different things on there. There are all representations of real-life objects that are
simplified in emoji form. I think this will give
you a good starting point for you to be able to draw this with your own style in the
simplest manner that you can. Now I'm going to be drawing my environmental features so
I like to use my maybe draw a ground first and then I draw lamp posts
quite a lot so it's just a line and then I
thicken the bottom part and then for a tree, I would just start
with the trunk. Go up and then without
taking my marker off, just scribble, make a
halo around the trunk. Maybe I can thicken
it just a little bit, make it rougher and
if I'm going to draw a bunch of
trees or a forest, what I would do is just
act like I'm drawing some speech bubble or a cloud. Add lines like this. Some would be forward, some would be back just
to show that randomness. Maybe add some flair in here. Just to show the
leaves dropping. Then I would show
probably a human, just like I've drawn here, just to show that scale. I think conveying scale is really beneficial
for concept diagram. It helps clarify that. This isn't a bunch of
mushrooms or cotton candy. There's a person right here. You can see them and maybe the person would
be of the size right here. Lastly, I would like to
show you how I portray institutions or
house of any kind. This is my go-to shape. I will just draw a rectangle with an inverted
triangle like this. This would be my house. That's it. I'll probably
just add maybe a door. Maybe I'm going to add
a tree in the corner. Maybe I would add a couple
of flying birds and the sun. Just like we were kids, the houses that
we made back then and if it's a
larger institution, let's say I would be like, Line 1, Line 2, Line 3 and then I
would have a door and maybe I want the inside
to have if I have time, I'm not going to do
this every time. It's going to show
windows this way. I wouldn't draw all of
them IN all the way, I want to keep that
sketchy quality. I will do the same thing adding a tree for
reference right here. Maybe I would add an
ambulance shape right here. Maybe add a rocky thing
here, bushy thing there. Maybe a window and a human
here for scale and that's it. I'm done. These are
my inanimate objects. You will be using these for
our final project perhaps, and these would be
my animate objects. Add some kind of dimension here, maybe add some grass or hedges. All of these things would
just be representations of the real thing so this
comes with experimentation. You might draw it
now and be like, this looks nothing
like a bird or this looks nothing like a
house or something but eventually,
you'll get better and better at it and
you will be able to make things
simpler and simpler without losing what it is
that you're trying to convey. After this, we're
going to be moving on to the class project. We'll keep this with us
just to reference from it. See you there.
6. Class Project: Visualize Your Tomorrow: [MUSIC] Now for
our class project, we're going to be
visualizing our tomorrow. Of course, we can't
turn a single hair on our head gray or back
to its natural color. But if nothing drastic was
going to happen tomorrow, what would your day look like? Can you have a mental image of what you would do from
the moment you wake up, until the moment
you go back to bed. That's what I'm going
to be doing right now, so grab a new piece of paper, pen or whatever
medium you like to use and let's get to it. Now that we have
these two pieces of paper with our drawings, we can use them as a reference, some visual vocabulary that
we can keep going back to to draw what our
tomorrow might look like. This is going to be
some visual schedule, it's going to be very rough. I'm only going to be focusing
on just half the day, so from like 6:00
AM until 6:00 PM. This is just the only part of
the day that I won't plant because this is where
I'm going to be having meetings, getting things done. After that, I wanted to
have a more relaxed, laid-back thing for
the rest of the day. I don't want to
plan the whole day. Even this is a very
tentative schedule, it's not very strict. I am just drawing it as whimsical and as a
fun as I can draw it. Even the line that'd
be connecting my morning hour mark
until my mid-day mark and all the way to the end
of my day mark or the end of my schedule is going
to be some curvy line. In the beginning
of the day, I'd be waking up hopefully at 6:00 AM, no guarantee for
that, unfortunately, because I'm not very good at waking up
early in the morning. This is going to be
more imaginative, so I'll just be drawing
the sun in there as if I'm sleeping outside out in the sky. There'll be the sun there. It's not even in the right position in the
sky given how early it is. I will just write
wake up and please, because I hope that I actually
follow my alarm and get up from my bed at 6:00
AM or around 6:10, 6:15. By around 7:00,
8:00, 9:00, 10:00, I'm just going to be planning
the rest of my morning, I just wrote down my hours so
I know what would be where. I would be drawing a plate to depict my food or my breakfast. It would be eggs, probably, scrambled eggs or maybe
eggs with tomatoes, onions. I think I'm going to
be making it myself. I will just try to
have breakfast, unless someone else is making
breakfast in the house, then I'll probably
just take from that. That would be around
7:00-8:00 AM. Hopefully, right after that, I'd be jumping to working. Usually most of my work
is done on my laptop, so I'm just drawing my laptop
to depict those workouts. It will be around 2-3 hours. My laptop is black, so I'd be coloring
in my frame as well. This is just enough detail
for me to showcase. This is my laptop and it's just personalization element for me that it fits more like
a custom schedule for me. I'm also adding in
a cup because I usually need my morning tea. One tip that I have is if
you're going to be running your hand through the parts of the paper you've
already drawn on, lay down a piece of
paper there so you avoid smudging the parts that
you've already drawn. Now, I'm just writing
edit video and I'll be including some detail of
what that might entail. It might be for editing at least two lessons and prepare the third
lesson as well. This is just what
I'm hoping for, I don't want to pressure
myself to have to do this, it usually takes me more time than I
expect to edit videos. By the time I'm done with this, I'd probably be
preparing lunch which has to be injera because usually that I
have injera for lunch, it's one of my favorite
things in the world. It's a sour pancake well-known
in the Horn of Africa. I just love injera and I
probably have it with what? So it would probably
be some fir-fir. It's just something
I look forward to from the night before. Around 12:00 PM or noon, I'd be having lunch,
which hopefully injera. Hopefully, we'll have
fresh injera in the house. It's made at home usually. Right after lunch,
I'll hopefully around 1:30 PM start
working on a script. For my script, I want to depict it with just pieces of paper, even though I would write
my script on my laptop, but I don't want
that redundancy. I have two plates already for
my breakfast and my lunch, but I want to have
some variation. I don't want to
have two laptops, so I have a piece of
paper there instead. Wrote the time
approximately it would be 1:30 and wrote draft script. I'm just adding a few words to show what that would entail. One thing that I've found visual communication
can do or visualizing ideas that feel
complex to you or beyond your control can
do is break the ice. Because I had a workshop
recently where I was showing entrepreneurs how to visualize their business plans, and when they started comparing
each others drawings and they do their business idea on a piece of paper in the simplest form
that they could, they just laughed
at each other and would compare each other's
drawings and stuff. I felt like maybe some of them
felt insecure about that, but it was also a
way of them having fun and it's added
this informal element to this very stressful time in conceptualizing a
business and starting it. Right after my drafts writing, I'd be preparing for a meeting. I'm only depicting
that buy an outfit, so just a coat, I usually feel
very cold outside, so I just have a go-to coat, which is beige in color
and not very tall sleeved. I'm long-sleeved, so I just
drew what my coat looks like and if I leave by 3:30 my meeting would be around
probably 4:00-5:30, so I have to settle
that on a phone call. I'm just depicting two people, two mannequins the way I have in my animate objects class, sitting across from
each other on a chair. I messed up, added a circle
there in the middle, but I'm going to be
connecting it to an arm. It looks like I'm
holding something or this person is holding
something instead of it being a failed head. I just pushed my preparation
for the meeting a bit earlier so that I can
have my meeting on time, I don't want to be late again, I have this bad
habit of being late. Finally, I'm going to be
adding my Bible right here, so it would just be a book. This is to represent
the time where I'll be having my Bible study, which is approximately
around 6:30 PM. If people come later, it could be at around 7:00 PM, so this would go past my estimated
schedule and after that, I'll probably just
go home, rewind, have dinner, so I don't
want to depict that here. I'm just adding, filling in
the places that are empty. I added where maybe a
waiter would stand, a little writing on the book to show a bit more
detail. This is it. This is what it would look like. I'm using my thick chiseled Copic Ciao site to
show how my routine would move from my waking up to
having breakfast to editing my video to then moving
on to having lunch. It would have this zigzag
pattern throughout the day and I want it to be very
easy to follow for the eyes. I think this is one of
the most useful things that an adult can have. You can have all
these jumbles of drawings and illustrations
scattered all over the paper but then
when you connect them with an arrow structure, you can tell a story in a way. This arrow really stands out
because it's aligned with, I haven't used
anywhere in my paper yet and something that will stand out more would be
this chisel tip marker. I said I might not use it, but here I am using it for
my title because apparently, I have more space left than I
thought I would vertically. I am just using it to fill in the space that I have
left, the whitespace. The title for me is
one of the best parts because it feels like the parts where you messed up or fused disproportionately empty
on a piece of paper. You can compensate for it
by filling it with a title. One more thing I like to do
is add a dash of colors, so I'm just using
yellow and just yellow. I think I'll be adding a bit too much today because I want it to feel bright
and whimsical and I'm going to be coloring the sun and perhaps my scrambled
eggs because it's yellow and anywhere that I
think I want to pop of color, I want the paper to
feel filled up, mostly. Another thing that I wanted to bring up is colored pencils, crayons are things that we used as children to emit many of our kindergarten classes or
early primary school days. One thing I heard an
architect say is that when he's trying to make his clients feel at ease and he
wants them to show what spaces they want their
house interior to look like, he would give them crayons and just the tools that
children would use. It brings them back to that
position of being a child and just drawing what you want
to see or what you imagine. Using tools or the tools you present for visual
communication workshops or with people that you want to bounce ideas off
of really matters. He would use those crayons
and colored pencils with those clients and
then they would express ideas that
they would have otherwise been
intimidated to express. That's one tip that I
stole and actually I like. Once I'm done with
my colored pencils, I think this is enough color
for one piece of paper. I'm going to be adding a few
reminders here and there, it's to have some hierarchy in my visual schedule
so I can tell, these are just reminders. It's being written
by a thin pen and there's more to this than
meets the eye at first. It's not just one
linear schedule. There's a few reminders or a few things that pop up
that add some interests. It wouldn't just be these specific routines
that have followed. There'd be things that I
might do if I have time. I might make T in the
middle of my editing video. I might call my sister to ask her if I can
hitch a ride with her, take a ride with her to go to my meeting and I
can take a walk. This is very unrealistic. I don't take many walks
in the morning anymore, but I might take a walk
in the morning when I wake up before I
have my breakfast. It's really nice in my
neighborhood in the morning, so I am just adding those in. It's just to fill
in the part that are empty and to
serve as reminders. I'm just circling them with
yellow because I think it's balancing all the elements in this visual schedule out more. There are only
three of them here and I don't have much left. I want to leave negative space. As I said, I think it gives
the drawing room to breathe. It's really important for that and I'm just adding a few
more details with my pen. I felt like this place
was a bit too empty. I'm just adding a cup of water or something I might
have with my forefoot. Usually, fizzy drinks
go really well with fir-fir or sparkling
water with lemon, because the fir-fir is
very spicy and usually, most injera dishes are spicy. It's a good refresher. I have taken my arrow or my bubbly shapes from the
abstract shapes list. I have the arrow that I used to point from one
activity to the next. Mostly, I think I've
used elements for my inanimate and animate
objects, probably. From the inanimate and
inanimate objects, I think I've used the person. I have a three in my morning walk reminder and I have a person
in the video, the screen and I have
the book to depict the Bible study and
the piece of paper. The piece of paper looks like a book and different people that I have in
different postures, sitting down, standing up. I use the same sun
that I've used in the house or institutions
structure and/or illustration. This is it for my
visual schedule. If you want to see
more examples, you can check out
my bonus examples which will come after my
closing video and if you want to see more journals
planners that you will want to check out and which have more
of a visual emphasis, you can check out
my store link in the description and see
you in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
7. Closing: We've made it. Congratulations. Now, if you want to make this more
of a habit so that you can become more comfortable
with communicative drawing, you can check out my
account for more resources. If you're on Medium, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, yada yada, you can follow me
@wintaassefa1 and say hi, that you're from this class. Now if there's anything
I want you to take away from this class
it's for you to view sketching or simple drawing the way
you view speaking. It's to help you get
over any fear you may have of appealing
like a bad artist. If I'm going to be honest, I haven't completely
gotten over that fear but I think the
feedback I get from these life sketches and making these concept diagrams
and workshops have really shown me
that this isn't about my ego or about how I appear. It's about getting a
task at hand done or about communicating an idea
to another human being. I'd love to see you upload
your class project in the project section or any other progress that you might have made along the way, anything from the exercises and you do this, you
might have started. I'm rooting for you in whatever projects
that you take on. This final bonus lesson, I'm going to be sharing
a few more examples of concept diagrams, drawings that you can draw
inspiration from, and bye.
8. Bonus Lesson: More Examples: [MUSIC] Congratulations. Now that we're done
with the class project, I just wanted to show
you a few examples of other communicative sketches, and diagrams that I've made over the years just so you can get an idea of what methods
you can execute, or which way you can go when
you're making your own. This one is a cycle
of influence diagram. I made it around
2020, late 2020. I like to date my diagram, so matter how rough they are, so I can have a reference
point of when what was made, in case I need to
go back and check. This is made to give my clients an idea of what sun animation
drawing I want to make. I wanted to make a
conceptual diagram of the different members,
or the different groups of people who will be acting as main characters in my
sun animation story. There was a nurse
and elderly women. This was back when people were adjusting
to their life now that the pandemic had struck and all of these
different roles, all of these different
members of society had to interact with each other
in different ways. This is the concept diagram
of another concept diagram. Later on I would storyboard
it and talk in detail about what steps my animation
video would follow. As you can see,
all I did here was used my bubbles here and use a Copic Sketch marker to
make some render effects, so it pops more. It's still very rough. The clients were able to give
me feedback on what they thought of this, and what
changes they wanted to make. But it was clarifying enough along with the
script that I've sent too, so they can get a big picture
of what the whole story, narrative arc was
going to be about. We have the arrows, we have the bubbles
that I've showed you or the blobs that showed
us more friendly, sketchy, and this is still
in an amorphous state idea. I follow a similar
theme right here. This is very recent. I just made this to clarify
the different sections of a big book that I'm working
with different people in. It's an architecture
related book. It's ultimately about
trying to find solutions, whether design solutions,
architecture, education, and guiding the process
of trying to equip towns all over Ethiopia to
become more self-sufficient, self-reliant, and to dispense tools
in the most accessible, in most efficient way possible. This is about that. They'll be four books in
this entire collection, and it's going to be bound together once all
of them are done. But for now we're going
to have the first book, which will have the main idea. The second book, which is going to be more like a proposal. It's about what we're
going to do next. Establishing associations. We have established
that association, and I'm excited to see where that goes, and how
we're going to be able to dispense
this information in a manual that doesn't
feel very technical. This is going to be written
to dispense all the research, all the information
that's been gathered in my university or through my university staff
and students, so that all of these building, know-hows and skills
in other fields and education in building, and
construction industry can be then dispersed to
the farmers and the different people holding different occupations
all over Ethiopia. Though a lot of the country
is still not urbanized. A lot of people,
either because of environmental degradation
or other factors, are moving towards cities, and the cities are not
capable of accepting, or they don't have the
infrastructure to accept all of these different new people
coming from the towns. This entire project is
preparing for that problem and acting quickly so that
disaster doesn't commence. I'm excited to see where
this work will take us, and how the people we're going to be targeting it
at will receive it. But I think from now
that it's going to involve a lot of
visual components, and a lot of diagrammatic or
visual communication to explain the points that we're trying to get
across because that's much more effective than
writing in any language. This is my to-do list. Back when the pandemic
struck in 2020, I was in university, and I was about to finish. We were going to be
doing our thesis, but obviously we had
to go back home and we were in quarantine, and
we weren't able to continue. The last minute in October, we were supposed to
go back to school and finish our thesis
in a single month. Everything that was supposed to be done in the second
semester of the final year, we were supposed
to do in a month. This was a crazy time because
I've already taken up some clients for my sun
animation work, my drawing work. I was working on my
first Skillshare class. It was a very chaotic
time and I made this very quickly just to diagrammatically
explain to myself what is it exactly
that needs to be done and to divide it into different chunks that I
think, this is doable. I'm just going to get done
with this block-by-block. It worked, as you can see, I was done with most of this. These are drawings
that were going to be incorporated in my thesis. I didn't bother with using
a different paper for this. This side was for my non
school-related work, and this side was for my degree
or my architecture works. Some of it is pulled over. It's very rough as you can see, but I highly suggest that
when you're going through an overwhelming season or if you're doing any
kind of planning, that you make it
more diagrammatical, make it more visuals
so that it feels a lot better to tackle these
tasks one by one this way, and to have it all pop out. I made this one while I was preparing for this
class actually. It's just me experimenting with what kind of concept
diagrams would look better. I posted this on my social
media and asked people which set of concept diagrams
they liked the most. They gave me an idea of
which one popped out to them best or which
felt most accessible, and that was it for that. What is this? Is this a
Venn diagram? I'm not sure. I work on music and I really dedicated many hours to it,
especially during quarantine. I was trying to map my circle of influences so that I
can have an idea of what music I want to make and somehow pin down my focus or the area that I want to
get really good at and the music that I want to end
up producing and making. These are the different
influences that I have. The further away from
the center you are, the lighter I think the
influence would be. The one in the center
would be the most influential to me and then
the more outside you go, the less influence I am planning to draw from
this for my own work. This one is especially rough, but I still wanted
to share it with you guys because I was preparing a concept or a
storyboard for my clients, and I didn't want to make the concept diagram
in the first go, because I was being paid for this work, and I felt pressured to produce something much cleaner and much better looking. I practiced a few different
types of concept diagram, different simple sketches that I would use in my storyboard. Then I went with one. This is another storyboard
that I went through. This isn't exactly
easy communicating, it takes time, honestly. I just wanted to include
it because I think when you go down that visual
communication path, story-boarding is a
natural place to go to me. I make all of these
panels before I go in and make my film, whether it's a sand animation
film or some other kind, so it's mostly sand
animation though. This is incomplete, but it gives me a good idea of where
I'm going to start, how I'm going to go even with a very fluid medium like sand, [NOISE] so there's that. These are different stylistic
choices that I made for the book that I mentioned earlier about the association, the book that's going
to turn into manual. So this is the purple
and yellow combination. I got this from drawing ideas. Great book by the way, I highly recommend it. If you want to get more
into communicative drawing, organize workshops even,
or have your team, your clients, or anyone
that you want to work with, do this more visually, then I highly recommend that
you go through that book. It shows you a lot of steps and tips and
little hacks that can make your drawings really pop and make it look
really dynamic and fresh. This is a bit more advanced, I guess, but again, I'm just trying to communicate
a style which is white on black style that I am a fan of that and I just wanted to
use colors that would pop against this and
bubble diagrams, the blogs, the phone,
my speech bubble, my mannequin, my person, and I have a similar
idea right here it's another style exploration. I'm going to be proposing this
to see whether it can work in a book format
or not if it can look fresh and
communicative enough. It's the same idea with
the blogs, these people, there are circles that lead from one point to the next and arching in a speech bubble. In a pie graph, I really
like communicating data through these
simple diagrams as well. Data should obviously
be accurate, but I like the
diagrams to be rough. I just wanted to include
this to say that it doesn't have to be pen and colored
pencil that you use, you can use watercolor to create something very
simple, very rough, and then do some
line art just to outline the points of
emphasis you want to make. This was just me trying
to divide our tasks, I was working in
different groups back in architecture
school so I had all of these different projects that we had to submit
and assignments, so we had to divide it
into different people. So my friends, hi. This is the map we used in Al Hasa and this was
the town that I went to execute some research to find out whether
the town people, the community leaders will
actually like the designs that my colleagues have
come up with or not. So we gathered a bunch of
the community leaders under a roof and we put all of
these tiny wood blocks that would act as placeholders for the existing houses and we placed it all over the map that we have
laid down on the floor. It took a while to explain this block represents
your hospital, this represents this school, this represents this
house or this main bar, restaurant that is quite famous in the area
because they've never seen their town through an eagle's eye view like that. So we had to explain that first but
then once they got it, they were very involved
in the entire planning. They were like, this works, but we need to make
this improvement, we need to move this here, we would prefer the
school to be here nearer to this group
of houses instead of further away and
we would like to build clinic first before
we build a high school, and the women would have
their own priorities and then the different groups
of farmers would have their own priorities and
they would argue about that. But we wouldn't have
been able to reach that level of arguing and debating if they did not understand what we were talking
about in the first place. So if you've never seen your hometown in
that view before, it would be very hard for
a group of architects or urban planners or
whatever to come to you and be like, you know what, we were planning to have
some master plan but we want your input on what you'd like to build first
in which phases, and where you want these
different things to be placed. No matter how many
words you use, it's very hard to visualize
an entire town in one go, in one mental image. So it was very important
to have that laid out in some
three-dimensional form with all those different blocks on a map and showing the main road where
that main road would be with another road would
split and lead you to another town that they're
familiar with, they know. So it was because of that visualization
that we were able to communicate other things and other ideas and
they were able to communicate back to us and
move the blocks by themselves. They went forward
and they were like, we want this to be here, we want this to move this way. This whole conversation became
possible because of that. So I just wanted to bring up that example because
I think it's one of the most fascinating
experiences of my life really solidified the
importance of visualizing. For me, it was 3D visualizing, it wasn't simple sketching, but it's all in the realm of visual communication and
how that can facilitate participation from different
groups of people and break different barriers
in language and culture, so that was awesome. I'm glad you went along
with me on this slide and I hope that you can
share whatever projects you have in the project section and that you wouldn't be afraid to communicate visually as
often as you deem necessary. So you can check my resources
in the Resources tab, the different links
that I have to my store and have a lovely day
and rest of the month, the rest of the year,
rest of time on Earth. I look forward to seeing
you somehow again. Bye. [MUSIC]
Winta Assefa, Architect & Visual Communicator
