On World Sketchnote Day, young artists share their favourite work and what visual note-taking means to them
Today is a throwback to our school days and every time we've had our notebook confiscated because the pages were filled with more doodles than notes. We felt a tad guilty then, but now we pity ourselves because we didn't have Instagram. A few weeks ago, we learned that there was an actual term for our masterpieces — sketchnotes. And then there was actually a day to celebrate them, created by illustrators Mark Rohde and Mauro Toselli in 2016. So, we caught up with five illustrators who share their favourite sketchnotes (PS: no pages were torn).
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Travel tales
In the middle of heavily photoshopped pictures that "globetrotters" share on social media, Kriti Monga's sketchnotes come as a breath of fresh air. Her most cherished sketchnote is from a memorable month in Italy in 2016.
"My favourite kind though, is those drawn while backpacking: a lot of museums, art, food and life is captured in my travel diaries," she says.
Monsoon magic
Gaurav Ogale is a known visual chronicler. "This is a testimony to the unpredictable monsoon in Mumbai and the mischievous umbrellas that are sold off the streets.
This is from a page in my journal, sketched while it was pouring on Marine Drive as I stared hopelessly at my broken umbrella," he tells us.
Rough work
Tanya Eden, the illustrator behind Audible India's Mafia Queens of Mumbai, has a habit of scribbling as she speaks. Eden's pick is one from a content project in Bengaluru. She recalls, "I was creating comic strips and ended up creating more than 100 characters.
In between the creative rush I felt the need to create my own character with a script. I referred to a Playboy magazine cover and the character was named Cookie after my pet name. But it remained unfinished."
Client call
Indie comics publisher and animator Abhijeet Kini is no stranger to storyboarding workshops. According to him, "Artists are better at scribbling thoughts than writing. Our thoughts are always in doodles."
So, before conducting a workshop, drawing a sketchnote helped him remember his agenda better. "I give the participants a short movie or animation idea that they have to convert to a storyboard. It needs to have scene break-ups as well as durations in place.
I scribbled out a Batman doodle because I wanted to give an example of a Batman scene from the movie. There's also an action pose doodle to remind me to get them to sketch out action sketches before starting off the main storyboard," he explains.
Abhijeet Kini
Laying it out
Self-taught artist and teacher Jai Ranjit uses sketchnotes as a medium of planning.
Explaining his piece, Ranjit says, "It helps to take a concept from idea to reality by creating improvisations and realising it physically rather than exploring it just in the mental space.
This one is a pre-final layout reference for a live mural project with my students at ISDI for the Royal Opera House, that was executed last year."
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