On the 27th of May 2020 I was a guest at the (currently virtual) Copenhagen Visual Thinking Meetup. Together with the organiser Yuri and over 80 participants we played with drawing people and how they can help us to express abstract concepts.

For the first hour, Yuri led us through some warm-up exercises and basic people sketching. Then I took over for the remaining two hours with two more exercises and some tips and answers to people’s questions.

We tried to surprise ourselves by developing characters from a simple stick figure skeleton, that we added expressions, emotions, clothes, accessories, props and language to step-by step until a whole story emerged that we hadn’t planned in the beginning. When everybody shared their work it was amazing to see so many different characters that all started from the same source posture.

We then talked about how drawing people can help us to illustrate more abstract concepts in interesting ways and tried it out by visualising different 5-stage processes with topics ranging from the development of love relationships to the stages of decision making.

It was a lot of fun and everybody created some amazing work.

As a super duper bonus for me, it was one of the rare moments, where I was NOT the one taking sketchnotes, but others were sketchnoting the things I was sharing. Thanks to everybody who showed up and participated.

I collected all the lovely sketchnotes that people posted from the session, so even if you couldn’t make it to the meet-up, you can still enjoy the visual summaries. The sketchnotes below are by Yuri Malishenko, Telse Ahrweiler, Susanne Krogh-Hansen, Krisztina Szerovay, Claire Louise Correia and Makayla Lewis. You all rock.