International Sketchnote Camp 2019 in Paris
In August the third edition of the International Sketchnote Camp took place in Paris (or rather NEAR Paris in the small town of Louveciennes). For 2 and a half days 170 people sketched, talked and exchanged about the practice of making things visual.
It was the second time I attended (after the first ISC in Hamburg two years ago) and it was lovely to see old friends, meet people I only know through their work and their posts on social media and make completely new contacts.
I had the honour to be invited to give the keynote of day 2. Together with the audience I dove head first into exploring how improvisation can add new perspectives to our sketching practice.
Picture by Caroline Roy
We drew, played, explored, closed our eyes, changed which hand holds the pen, noticed how moving the arm feels, made random animal noises, laughed, generated collaborative stories and hopefully discovered one or two new things about being in the here and now when we move our pen over the paper.
In the first exercise, we sent a little dot on a walk through an imaginary park on our paper, trying (and feeling) out different ways it can move.
Then we used the same attention for the movement of the line to sketching a scene several time in different ways and with different qualities of lines.
And last but not least we played the ‘Random Story Game’ I invented a while ago, using randomness and collaboration to come up with surprising characters and actions. If you’re interested in playing this one yourself with a friend or a group, check out this blogpost with all the instructions you need.
Images by @tewoz and @tbosdeveix
My favourite part of doing a session at visual conferences is being in the rare position of MY talk being sketchnoted (instead of just me sketchnoting everybody else’s talks). Here is a little collection of some of the sketchnotes I found on Twitter.
Besides lots of beautiful and insightful conversations, I spent rest of the time attending a few sessions by other people.
My favourite was the Urban Sketching session with Mathieu Letellier outside in the park. It’s been such a long time that I just did quick sketches of people in random places. Sitting outside in the grass with my pen and notebook reminded me of my time at art school where we constantly sketched people in the park, on the underground, at a café and in many other random places.
I enjoyed returning to the beginner’s mind and attend Isabelle Pailleau and Béatrice Lhuiller’s session on ‘Sketchnotes for Beginners’.
I drew an accidental representation of the product development cycle as a pooping dog in Willemien Brand’s session on Visual Templates.
I loved the random forced combinations of images and drawings that Anna van der Aar made us do in her session on ‘UX Comics’.
A big MERCI to the wonderful organising team who did a fantastic job to make the conference run smoothly and make everybody feel welcome and included.
See you next year in Belgium!