It’s the end of the year…. time to take a look back for a moment before the New Year takes flight.

If you’ve been browsing Instagram lately, you might have noticed lots of people posting these #best9 grids, a collection of their 9 most liked posts of the year. I am using my #best9 as a lense to look back on my year.

Enjoy :)

How to draw a handshake

Drawing hands is hard. Drawing two hands is double hard. I always struggled to draw a handshake until I broke down the ‘choreography’ into simple steps and practiced it dozens of times. This little gif is part of a series of drawing instruction gifs I made a while ago and this one was viewed more than 12.000 views and got over 1.300 likes.

Hand to head

More hands. This time placed on the head. This image is the conclusion of an exploration of different ways you can place your hand on your head, what gestures and emotions they form and how to draw them in a simple way.

Practicing hands

Aaaand… more hands! This time just some quick warm-up / practise sketches. If you want to practice hands (and figure drawing in general), I recommend checking out this website, that provides reference images for a quick practice session

Yoga postcards

In 2018 I drew lots of yoga postures, both as simple stick-figures to capture whole yoga sequences (… I even wrote a book about this) as well as full-body figures, mostly as a little thank you when signing my ‘Notes from Yoga Teacher Training’ book when people buy it. In November, I made a set of postcards with my favourite poses.

#ichgebeauf

Every Sunday, stick figure humour genius @kriegundfreitag puts out a little drawing prompt under the hashtag #ichgebeauf. This sketch was my response to one of these prompts.

Visualising Romeo and Juliet

When I needed a good example to demonstrate the power of visual thinking to explain complex stories, I decided to draw an overview diagram of one of the most iconic love stories of western literature. If you need a little refresher: I also made an animated version talking you through the story.

How to draw a Kangaroo

In August I spent 3 weeks in Australia, speaking and teaching a workshop at UX Australia conference, but also hanging out with a really good friend and his family. And when down under, it’s probably mandatory to figure out how to draw a kangaroo. So I did.

Sketching Interfaces workshop

In 2018 I taught many sketching workshops (both inhouse and public ones). I always tweak and improve my material and this shot shows some of the most recent updates to my ‘Sketching Interfaces’ class.

Visual Starter Kit

I love Visual Thinking and Sketchnoting and have been practicing these skills for many years. It’s like second nature to me now. But if you’ve never done anything like it, it can be hard to know where to start. That’s why I made a little Starter Kit with a few exercises and tips for how to start injecting some images and visual structure into your meeting notes and project planning. You can download it when signing up for my newsletter.

Bonus: Peaceful animals

This is not in the Instagram #best9, but it is one of my personal favourites this year. I love how peaceful and happy the animals look with their eyes closed… And this is actually going to be a little product very soon. Stay tuned :)

If you enjoyed this post, you should probably follow me on Instagram to see more drawings in 2019 :)

Happy New Year!