Relaxed Sketchnoting at Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2023

Beyond Tellerrand conference came to Berlin again this September and my friend Marc invited me to come by. I only had a few hours spare so I only joined for a couple talks on day 2. I hadn’t planned to take proper sketchnotes but I had my iPad with me and I decided to just listen and and maybe doodle along if I felt like it – no pressure, no expectations, nothing meant to be shown or posted necessarily.

And, well… I doodled along. First talk was by French illustrator Guillaume Kurkdijan (you can watch the talk here). I love his cute 3D-isometric style and how he plays with shapes and proportions in a way that everything just looks super cute and loveable. Instead of trying to capture all the (very good) points he made in his talk (about how to develop your own style), I enjoyed just copying some of his illustrations in my own way, trying to understand his shape-language by letting it flow through my own hand.

The ‘sketchnote’ is more of a loose sketchy collection of elements and principles I enjoyed in the work he showed and a very quick and rough attempt to understand it not only through my eyes, but with my hand.

The second talk I listened to was by Joel Gethin Lewis whose work I’ve been familiar with since my time in London (you can watch the talk here). His talk on ‘Noticing’ was very inspiring and I couldn’t resist to capture the main points that resonated . I had drawn his portrait at the start of the talk and as the points he made were very personal, I ran with the little character to illustrate each of the points (with the character getting more wild and lively with each illustration… :D). I love creating series of images that keep one element and explore the variations that are possible within this frame of reference.

I also made some individual vignettes afterwards showing a few points just on their own.

So that was it. Just a couple of talks and some relaxed sketching without expectation of producing anything ‘proper’… and yet something appeared on the (digital) paper in the end. It’s nice to remember that I don’t need to force it and just go with the flow sometimes :)