Emily Mills Grows Her Illustration, Visual Facilitation, And Business Skills

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Emily Mills grows her illustration, visual facilitation, and business skills - S16/E01

1M ago 40:52

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In this episode, Emily Mills shares insights she’s learned in illustration, visual facilitation, and business in this live interview recorded at the International Sketchnote Camp in San Antonio.

Running Order

Intro
Welcome
Who is Emily Mills
Origin Story
Emily's current work
Sponsor: Concepts
Tips
Tools
Where to find Emily
Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tips

Keep on experimenting.
Try something outside your practice but still creative.
Be careful when sketchnoting becomes work then find something else to supplement that joy factor.

Credits

Producer: Alec Pulianas
Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde and I'm here doing the Sketchnote Army Podcast live in front of a studio audience with Emily Mills, who actually appeared at least on one episode. We have to verify the archives and see how many she's been on it. Maybe two others before, but welcome back, Emily.

Emily Mills: Thank you. Glad to be back.

MR: So when you were on, I think it was pretty earlier in your career, maybe not at the beginning, but it was pretty early in your career. I think you maybe were independent at the time.

EM: Mm-hmm.

MR: And that, I think you worked for a company for a while. Instead of doing it this way, let's first say who are you and what do you do.

EM Yeah. My name is Emily Mills. I'm an illustrator, and that's the big umbrella term that I use now because I do a lot of different types of illustration, and I think for me, sketchnoting falls under that. So if I meet Joe Schmo on the street, I'm an illustrator, and then once I get to know you, then it's like I'm a book illustrator, I'm a graphic recorder, I'm a sketchnoter.

MR: You can kind of refine into those sections.

EM: Yeah, little buckets.

MR: Got it. How did you come to that decision about umbrellaing underneath Illustrator? Did it go through some iterations?

EM: Yeah, a lot of trial and error, because my background is in graphic design. And so, for a while, it was like, I'm a creative, I'm a designer, and then I stopped doing design and I had to refine the language. It's always an ever-evolving process. I'm sure it'll change in a year or two.

MR: Got it. We talked about it in the original episode, but it would be fun to hear, now that we have got new period of time that you've been doing this work, your origin story, how did you get into this? And then bring us up to the current day. But you can go all the way back to when you were a little girl if you like, and sort of—

EM: Crayons on the wall.

MR: Yeah. Any kind of key moments that have sort of led to where you are now.

EM: Yeah. So growing up as a kid, I really liked that. I started cartooning. I was very inspired by The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. I really liked Garfield. Just pretty much anything in the newspaper I was a huge fan of. And so I drew comics, cartoons. Growing up I had a little strip called Sheepish. I had a strip called Busted Wheel that was like a Western theme one. I had one about dingoes. I was really into animals. And then when I hit middle school, my school was kind of new, and so they started a school newspaper. And so, I did the school newspaper cartoon from eighth grade, actually, all the way through college.

MR: Wow.

EM: So my background was, I just like drawing, I like characters, I like creating stories that are very short. And then, studied graphic design in college because that was around the 2008 crash, and everyone in my life was saying, "You have to get a job." And I was like, "But I wanna do art." So studying graphic design was like my way of doing both. And studied the graphic design, went to graphic design career, but I still kept cartooning. In my office, whiteboard door, I would draw a little cartoon every week.

Had a coworker that remembered that when he had left, he went to work for a video studio. They hired me to do a whiteboard video. I'd never heard of that or done one, obviously. And so, they brought me in to do that. We ended up doing two or three of those, and I kind of put that in my portfolio. Then a company saw the whiteboard video, and they were like, "Hey, have you ever done sketchnoting?" I was like, "I don't know what that is." But it was, kind of like a cool moment because by the time I had hit college, newspapers were basically no more. So my dream of becoming a newspaper cartoonist when I grew up were kind of dashed.

MR: You sort of lived that life through your high school and college years.

EM: Yeah. So it was like, "I'm gonna be a cartoonist for the newspaper when I grow up." And then it was like, "Oh, newspapers don't exist, so I don't know what to do anymore. I guess it's just graphic design." So when someone told me about sketchnoting it was like, "Wait, I can be a cartoonist for real, like when I grow up, it's like another avenue?" And so, I was excited about that. My style's more illustratory and less stick figures, more characters just because that's where my background is. But worked for a company for a short time doing graphic recording, and then went out on my own. And I've just been doing that since 2016.

MR: Great. And I think I've seen you kind of refining the work you've done from that moment you went independent. In a lot of ways, I feel like you've narrowed your focus a lot because I think when you started, you were doing graphic design, you're still taking contracts for that, but I think you've narrowed it down to fewer things.

EM: Right.

MR: What would you say it would be your strengths areas that you sort of would lead with or you consider are your strengths that you do now?

EM: I really like graphic recording at live events. So whether that's a virtual graphic recording gig on my iPad, or it's in-person at a giant eight-foot board. I really enjoy the live events. I think I just am the most experienced with that. But I also really enjoy book illustration doing—now when people hear that, they think kids lit. And that's not what I do at all. Like, I'm actually not a very whimsical, cute illustrator. And so, I don't do kids’ books. I just do adult business books. But I really think I do have like a cartoony style, but it lends itself well to business ideas. I really love illustrating "boring" things and kind of creating the life in it.

MR: Making them more interesting.

EM: Yeah.

MR: Or revealing the interesting nature of the concepts or ideas.

EM: Right. And so those are the two areas that I like to lead with. Like, "Oh, let me illustrate your live event." And if you don't have a live event, maybe you have an article or a blog or a book that I can illustrate for. I recently just took a workshop on visual facilitation because after doing live events for almost 10 years, I've learned a lot about meetings, and I've seen a lot of meetings run very poorly and I'm like, "You know what? I think I could learn to do that." And having the people skills to facilitate a room is a skill set that I don't have, but I'm excited about maybe stepping into.

MR: Well, as someone new to that space and knowing graphic recording and sketchnoting and those things, how would you separate the skills needed for graphic recording, live sketchnoting with now facilitation from your perspective?

EM: I think it's a spectrum. On the far left, you have straight-up illustration-like art. And then on the far right, you have facilitation, which is like, just writing. And I think in the middle is where it gets confusing. I would say sketchnoting is probably more on the left-hand side because of course it's ideas, not art, but we still like to add color and shapes and creativity. Then as you move towards the facilitation and on the right, you lose the art, but you can still be visual without having the art.

MR: Do you think with facilitation, it's a little bit more of people skills that you're learning?

EM: Definitely.

MR: Because you own the visual skills, that's not an issue, you're confident there.

EM: Yeah. The workshop I took was three days long, and the first day and a half was really focused on graphic recording. And a lot of the students in the class hadn't done it, so that was their first time for me, it was actually—

MR: You had that advantage. Yeah.

EM: It was a helpful review. I actually did learn a few new things, but the last day and a half was all facilitation. It was reading the room, learning how to deal with "problem children," and learning templates to bring people through problems. Facilitation is also about you not being the star, but the group being the star. So learning to get the focus off of yourself and into the group.

MR: Yeah. You're a little bit like my friend Steve Silbert. He's an agile coach but like a scrum master in his perspective as someone who eliminates blocks from the group. So to let them flow and keep going, in a lot of ways the facilitators doing those same things, but in a room, in a meeting, in a set time. I could imagine in a meeting like this, talk about "problem children," someone who keeps throwing in some outside of the agreed upon scope of what we're gonna talk about and drawing the group into argument or something. And being able to shut that down and redirect, those are really important skills.

EM: Yeah. And I think those skills lend themselves well to any profession, even if I never end up pursuing facilitation, I'm really glad I took the workshop.

MR: So here's a question that's I didn't think about until we got into this discussion was, what if you're an introvert, someone who's not a people person, do you think you can be a facilitator or would that be challenging?

EM: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it probably depends on the person because I think we all express our creativity and introversion and extroversion on a spectrum. Like me, I'm definitely an introvert, but I can turn on the extroversion. I might step into a facilitation role and thrive, but then I might need to take two days off after that.

MR: Yeah and restore.

EM: So maybe the extrovert can do that and then they just jump into work the next day. So maybe it's more about the recharging and less about the ability.

MR: So sort of knowing yourself.

EM: Yeah.

MR: So the things you might do as an introvert would be, "I know this is stressful for me, so maybe I make sure I get rest on the front end. I do a lot of prep. I know my people, I read my information." Which is always good practice, but maybe that gives a introvert structure and confidence. And then knowing that I should not organize some brain-heavy thing the day after, would be just knowing yourself so that you don't do things that put yourself in a pinch.

EM: Introverts might actually be in an advantage now that I think about it because an introvert doesn't want to be the star versus an extrovert—

MR: That's a good point.

EM: - who gets to be a facilitator, they're just like, "Oh my gosh, look at all these people looking at me. This is great." Versus an introvert who's like, "Let's get the attention off of me as soon as possible."

MR: Yeah. I've been fascinated with restaurant stuff lately. You think about like, so there's back of house in front of house. So back of house where they make the food, the front of house is where they take the orders, but there's someone who, they call it manning the pass or running the pass. You're the one in between those two places.

You take all the heat from the customers, but you don't often tell the people and back. You relay it in a nice way. And then you gotta yell at these guys, "Hey, I need a hamburger. Come on, I need a hamburger." And you're managing the expectations of the front of the house. So in a lot of ways that facilitators a little bit like that role.

EM: That's cool. I love that.

MR: Interesting. You've done this education. Do you have a sense whether that makes sense as another offering you might offer or is that an experimentation, you're gonna do?

EM: It's definitely an experimentation. I think just having done graphic recording for nine years, I don't feel stagnant, I'm always looking to make things better. And I think it's easy to hit a wall and just stay there because I'm comfortable and it's, "I've hit my groove, I've hit my stride, I know what to do." But once I just keep showing up in the same way, it's like, "Hmm, I don't think I could keep going like this forever, how can I, I don't know, shake things up?" That's the best way I can phrase it.

MR: And expand your skills so you could—if the job was maybe—so coming back to this is, I've heard in past discussions with people who do this work that often they'll have a facilitator and a visual person together in a room because it's really hard to do both.

EM: Right.

MR: It can be done. There are people that are really good that they could do it. The first person that comes to mind is Brandy Agerbeck. Really good at both, right? But that's like the unicorn skill, right, to be able to both do management. Manage the room, you know, stop the "annoying kids" from causing trouble and getting visuals on the wall, is really challenging.

EM: Yeah, it is a lot.

MR: Did they talk at all about that kind of setup where you maybe partner with someone?

EM: Yeah, they did. They mentioned it's good to have all the skills so you can do what you can by yourself to the ability that you can. The instructor said he always works with another graphic recorder. Even if he knows how to graphic record, he hires somebody else because they're passive. They're in the background constantly capturing. And then he can always interact with them because he has that graphic recorder experience. They speak the same language. He can direct them in a way that helps create that artifact for the group.

That, I think a graphic recorder could do by themselves, but the facilitator can help direct the graphic recorder. So many times, we get in a live event and we don't know what's gonna happen. We don't know if the speaker's gonna go over or if something's actually important or if it's a tangent. The facilitator can tell the graphic recorder, "This is a tangent, don't capture it." Or, "This is actually really important, draw that huge." So it could be a really cool partnership.

MR: That makes me think too the way you partner. You could have two graphic recorder facilitators like a tag team in wrestling, right? Like, ding and you tag in and this person goes to the wall and they're drawing while this person's facilitating and then you would switch back, and you could have this kind of dual thing. Maybe there's strengths that one person has that the other doesn't have, and you get more out of that situation.

EM: Yeah, I think partnerships would be really important moving into a group like that.

MR: And I imagine too, as you do that work, a facilitator might like say, "I can do visuals, but it's not my strength. I really like the facilitation role." And they look for people who understand the dynamic but can do the wall stuff. And then the people that do the wall stuff could then have these partnerships and know, "Okay, I got this situation where I need a strong facilitator so I can focus on the visuals 'cause it's important." Then you would partner. So you have these options to mix and match based on what you wanna do.

EM: Yeah.

MR: So I heard you telling a story, and this will our last discussion on this space 'cause it's really fascinating, is you were just at the IFVP event in New Jersey.

EM: That's right.

MR: And you put yourself out there to say, "Hey, I will sketchnote the opening session." And then suddenly you got called up to the front. Tell us that story. I don't wanna lead too much with details, so.

EM: Sure. So IFVP is the International Forum of Visual Practitioners. They have a conference every year. For the keynote and some of the workshops, they had a sign-up sheet for graphic recording those sessions, kind of on stage to the side. And it was just like, "Hey, if you wanna practice, get your practice in." And so, I just signed up for the first keynote 'cause I thought it'd be fun.

MR: And you said nobody else signed up for it either, right?

EM: Right. No one else. The keynote speaker is a facilitator and a consultant who's very experienced. He's written books. And so I think people were a little weary or wary of recording in front of him. It was like high pressure. But I didn't know who the man was. I'd never heard of him before.

MR: What was his name?

EM: Chris McGough.

MR: Okay. I don't know him either. So I mean, now I'm learning things.

EM: Yeah, we're all learning together. And so, I guess some people were a little intimidated by that, but since I didn't know, I didn't know any better, so.

MR: Which is probably maybe the good trouble you can get yourself into, right?

EM: Yeah, so I signed up, I got there early and I made a little title. Chris pulled me aside a short minute beforehand and said, "We're gonna work together. It'll be fine." And it was very—

MR: What does that mean?

EM: I was like, what does that mean 'cause I'm very used to being in the back of the room. No one talks to me, no one interacts with me. It's kind of different that it was on stage, but it's IFVP, we're all watching each other. It's professionals. So I kind of understood it. Well, then he gets 10 minutes into his keynote and which is about facilitation and working with a graphic recorder. And it was kind of meta. He was like, "And the artifact that Emily is creating is really important, so why is she off in the corner? Let's bring her up to center stage."

MR: So he used as an opportunity to do a—

EM: A teaching moment.

MR: A lesson. Yes.

EM: So he brings me on center stage. That was kind of intimidating. Again, I'm used to being in the corner and I love the corner.

MR: As an introvert, that's a place you wanna be, your happy place in a lot of ways.

EM: So be like me, dark, happy corner. So then he brings me up and then he talks about how it's a partnership. Like we were just saying, the facilitator and the graphic recorder have experience with each other's skills and strengths and so they can work together. So he was saying, "We're working together as a team and we also wanna involve the group." So he stopped kind of the keynote and reached out to the audience and was like, "Okay, so we're about 45 minutes into this presentation, what did she miss? Is there anything missing from this graphic recording that is important enough to add back in?

There were some comments about gender. There was some comments about what kinds of drawings were there. Chris also had two flip charts that he was working on. And so, some of his images didn't get translated onto mine 'cause I was busy drawing what he was saying not what he was drawing. So I was like, "Well, he's got the flip chart, should I copy that? We already have one version." That was a lot for me to navigate.

MR: Where you've got two streams of information and you have to make decisions. Yeah.

EM: It was kind of a little overwhelming. I was just like making quick decisions in the moment saying, "Well, it's already on a flip chart. I don't wanna copy it. I'd rather just continue moving on."

MR: You could capture it later if you needed to.

EM: Right 'cause it's written down. I feel good about that. But then when he pulled the audience it was like, "Well, that thing Chris Drew is actually missing. We need to put it on the artifact." But I actually really enjoyed that process of involving the audience and getting their opinion because it's for them. It's great that I have this lens that I'm listening through, but if this artifact is for them, why don't they get a say? So that was a new concept for me. It kind of blew my mind. I was like, "That was actually really fun." It was stressful, but it was fun.

MR: I guess that reminds you that you're just one individual with two ears doing your best. And you can't be omniscient and know everything and stop time and rewind it and stuff in a live moment.

EM: Right.

MR: It's a good reminder.

EM: That also reminded me, so when people were giving their feedback, I also kind of just came to this realization on stage like, I can't please everybody in this audience. And so, I had to make decisions based on what I thought would be good for the group as well. One person said, "Add more emotion and color." And some person's like, "It's great as it is. Don't change anything." I can't please both people.

MR: Right. They're going two different directions.

EM: Right. So you just have to pick one and someone's gonna have their feelings hurt. That's just the reality of the world.

MR: Well, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, graphic recording, there's a real emphasis to try and be as neutral as possible.

EM: Right.

MR: And it's impossible to be completely neutral 'cause you have a perspective.

EM: Right. We're all biased.

MR: So that, you just have to accept and you try your best to kind of neutralize that. But I mean, probably in the moment, it wasn't great to have people like throwing darts at you. "Emily did this wrong. You did that wrong."

EM: Yeah. Afterwards, I had a few people come up to me and say, "I would've cried if I had been put on the spot like that." Or, "Oh, I'm glad it wasn't me."

MR: Yeah, yeah. But I think that's when you learn. The other thing too is just like here at this conference, you're kind of among friends and people who, they're not there to beat you up, they wanna improve so you learn. So you take all of that in that context, which is really good.

EM: Yeah. If it had been any other conference, I would've been probably way more scared to do that.

MR: Oh yeah.

EM: But if it's like, oh, we're all graphic recorders here. It's okay.

MR: It was a lesson for everyone else too. They were taking notes. I think back in time of moments when I've done that kind of facilitation, it wasn't that formal, but I worked in a software company. I was the only designer and there were 50 developers and project managers and stuff. And the way we—I just made the decision because I knew I was a bottleneck. How can I alleviate a little bit of this bottleneck?

So our solution was that business analysts and I, we had a big whiteboard in the space, and we had Whiteboard Mondays. And so, Whiteboard Mondays teams would rotate through and say, "Okay, what's the feature you're working on? Let's look at how it's done in the old app that we're replacing. Let's talk about what kind of stuff we think would be cool. While we're doing that, Mike will go up and draw what you're saying." And I would talk with people and try to capture that. So I would draw and then annotate in another color.

EM: Cool.

MR: And the cool thing was as we got into a rhythm where they got to expect and know how it worked. And I loved it when someone would say, "Hey, I have this idea, can I draw it?" I was like, "Yes." So I'd hand the marker off and they would draw their thing. I wouldn't redraw it, we would just leave it the way it was.

EM: That's cool.

MR: But they felt confident enough that they could come up and express their ideas. What I found was some of the most difficult features needed the developers to come up. The other thing was we would do sessions. I remember one session, it took like four or five or six iterations of sessions rehashing that idea 'cause it was complex. I think on the seventh one, before everybody came up, I drew like a tombstone and I wrote the feature on the tombstone and we were just having fun with it. But I think people really appreciated.

And some of the most innovative stuff was those hash out sessions where we had to go over it over it again and developers are drawing, but we came up with really cool stuff that way. And I think probably in the end, seeing that it was facilitated that was most interesting was if someone said, "Well who designed that feature?" It's like, "We all did."

EM: Yeah.

MR: It wasn't me, it wasn't John, it wasn't Mary, it was all of us together we're feeding and building this thing and reacting and giving comments. And ultimately, the sketches we did would then be taken by a developer and built. And there was modifications at that level. But that was a kind of a cool feeling to feel like this is a real collaborative environment. And that's probably—

EM: And it's not all on your shoulders if something fails.

MR: Right. You're just one part of the team and even if things would go wrong, we would correct it. There was always this feeling like there was the ability to have a say and correct things as we went through the process. I really enjoyed that. Now that is in a comfort zone for me. I knew that topic and I had a system. I wonder how I would do in unknown topics. And that's the challenge, right. You're always going into these unknown topics and trying to make sense of them. I guess you have the advantage of being an outsider. You hear and see things that the insiders miss 'cause it's now a blind spot for them.

EM: Mm-hmm.

MR: That's really interesting. That's exciting to hear that you're doing that and you're thinking about adding that, augmenting your skills that way.

EM: We'll see what happens.

MR: Yeah. Yeah, that's really great. Maybe you'll get some work from this. I don't know. So, we'll see. Probably the other thing that I think is big since you were on last at least that I'm aware of is, you were single at that point and now you're married. You also lived, I think in Nashville at the time.

EM: Mm-hmm.

MR: And now you live somewhere else. Talk a little bit about the transition personally and where you're at.

EM: I met my husband in Nashville. We were actually both from Colorado and we both moved to Nashville for job opportunities. And then we met at a drawing event that I was hosting called Drawing in Donuts.

MR: I remember you promoting that. Yep.

EM: So that worked out great. We were in Nashville seven years total. Neither of us are really big city people. I grew up in Colorado Springs. He grew up in Pueblo, which is like a south of Colorado Springs. I think we're both introverts. He's a little bit more extroverted than I am so big cities just aren't really our vibe. That's the best way I can put it. We also just had trouble connecting. I think Nashville's a different culture than we were used to. The South is very different from the Rockies and even the West coast. So, we just couldn't really adapt and fit in. And it just got old after seven years.

MR: Banging your head against the wall for seven years, right?

EM: Right. We just kept renewing our lease. Like I guess we'll stay, but after the pandemic, my in-laws, one of them retired and said, "Hey, we're gonna go on a grandkid tour. Why don't you come live in our house for free for a year?" And so, we were like, "Yes."

MR: Wow.

EM: Saving money is always a great thing especially after the pandemic. And we wanted to buy a house and Nashville was booming even more than it was when we moved there.

MR: Super difficult to find anything.

EM: Yeah. We were just kind of getting priced out and we didn't love it. So it's like, "Why are we here?"

MR: Right.

EM: So we just decided to go live with my in-laws for a year and then just figure that out. We thought maybe we'll go back to Nashville or maybe we'll go to Colorado or maybe there's something else that we haven't thought about. That was just a very temporary, like, "Hey, let's go figure it out. Just take the next step and we'll figure it out as we go." So we lived in my in-Law's house for a year and we loved it so much. We stayed. We moved out, got our own little rental in Bend, Oregon.

We love the culture there. We got connected to a church community really quickly. We made friends faster in Bend than we did in Nashville. And so, it just felt like a really good personal fit. I was a little worried moving from a city to a smaller city for work 'cause I do live events and all these conferences. And my work has shifted. I obviously don't do as many big conferences anymore, but I am doing a lot more virtual events.

MR: Which has also changed after the pandemic.

EM: Right. As people have been asking me here at the conference, how much are you working? What's your travel ratio? What's your graphic recording to illustration ratio? And I just say, "I am sorry, I don't have a good answer. Everything's been weird since the pandemic. Some years have been really great and other years it's been a struggle and I can't really pinpoint it to any one thing." I just kind of have a lot of things factoring into why business might be good or bad. And moving and pandemics don't really help with your data.

MR: Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of all mixed up.

EM: Yeah.

MR: It sounds like you found the right alignment. It sounds like even making friends with people was probably due to alignment. It aligned with the way you guys thought and were.

EM: Yeah. And I think just, I'm happier in drier climates than I am in humid ones.

MR: Yeah. Like everybody is maybe, I dunno.

EM: I got into birding during the pandemic. That was my hobby.

MR: I see that.

EM: And so Nashville has great birds and then we moved to Bend and it was just like, "Ooh, new birds." And so, like spending out time outside hiking and discovering the nature there, it's just been like personally fulfilling and really fun. I feel like I was creatively stifled in Nashville 'cause it wasn't a personal fit. Now that I'm in Bend, I feel like I'm personally thriving, but professionally, it's a little wonky still.

MR: Maybe I think that will come into alignment 'cause you're personally aligned.

EM: Mm-hmm.

MR: Which is, you're talking about doing facilitation, so that's another challenge.

EM: Right.

MR: And I would suspect that's a kind of a thing that you have to do in person more often than virtually.

EM: Mm-hmm.

MR: Which is probably also a challenge for you, right. You can't be in your dark corner, you gotta step out. Even though you're not the center of attention, it requires you to physically be somewhere.

EM: Yeah. And Bend is a resort town, so a lot of professionals from California and Portland and Seattle come to Bend for their retreats. So I see an opportunity interesting for maybe being a local facilitator or graphic recorder at these resorts. Maybe they don't have to bring in somebody from out of town. Maybe I can be the option.

MR: You wouldn't travel anywhere.

EM: Yeah.

MR: Hmm. Does Bend also offer a reasonably large airport so you can get places easily?

EM: Yeah, we have about five airlines.

MR: Oh wow.

EM: We have two baggage claims. It's a tiny little airport, but it connects to a good number of places.

MR: Oh, that's good. Well, and if you've got resorts there, people are at least coming in, which means they have to go out again.

EM: Right.

MR: So seems like it's worked out pretty well.

EM: Well, I'm only two years in, so I guess it can only go up from here.

MR: You've always got options, you know. So, let's talk a little bit about tools. We talked in the past, I don't even remember what tools you said. I'm sure you used Neuland markers at the time. What are you using now and are there new things that you've discovered that you might wanna share that people can check out?

EM: Yeah. One thing I've learned in the past couple years is I just got really bogged down in my tools. They were holding me back. So I used to use this—gosh, whatever that standard Moleskin size is, like the half page.

MR: Five by eight, or something.

EM: Yeah, five by eight. That was my go-to for eons. Then I realized I wasn't creating as many sketch notes because the page was too big. It just felt like a lot of work and I was like really busy with illustration. And so, my fun sketchnotes took the back burner.

MR: It become work.

EM: It became work. And I was like, it's too much to do. It's gonna take too long. So I just stopped. But once I got a smaller sketchbook, I felt like I was doing it way more often. I switched to these pocket Moleskin sketchbooks that are—

MR: And they're kind of horizontal, right?

EM: They're like a three by five. You can orient them horizontally or vertically. I really like those. I'm vacillating between those and, let's see if I can remember the brand name, handbook. It says hand.book on the cover. It's a sketchnote or sketchbook, that I found. Mike Lowery, who's an illustrator uses them a lot. I got the tip from him about these sketchbooks. They're square. I think it's maybe five or six by six. The paper is pretty thick and I really like those. So, usually have, one of those two sketchbooks with me.

MR: Going on. Okay. And I suppose the other thing too is those smaller books, a lot of the reason when I started Sketchnoting, I used a pocket-sized Moleskine was because I could stick it in my pocket, and only travel with a pen and the book. And I was always ready to go at any time. So like cycling or birding or hiking. That's the kind of thing you could take anywhere.

EM: Yeah, yeah. The big Moleskine journals, I never took them anywhere.

MR: Too clunky.

EM: My purse wasn't big enough.

MR: What about pens and things, have you found any different, have you gotten into any watercolors or anything like that? What stuff are you using in the books?

EM: U Brands has a felt tip pen. They're pretty similar to microns. You can buy 'em at Target or OfficeMax. I really like those. They're not very black, but they're pretty light, not light fast. They don't bleed. So I can write with the U Brand's pen and then put yellow over it and it doesn't bleed. I love that. And they don't bleed through the paper, which is great. Bleed through is my number one pet peeve right now.

MR: Okay.

EM: I do like Tombow Mono Twin pens.

MR: I love those too.

EM: Those bleed, but they're also really black suits, like pros and cons.

MR: Trade off. Yeah.

EM: And then, I don't really do watercolor. I'm still pretty much on the marker train. I use Tombow dual brush pens and zebra mild liner brush pens. Neuland, I don't have the fine tip Neulands as much. The ones I have are probably 10 years old. So the nibs are starting to wear out and I haven't replaced them, but Neuland fine ones. And then iPad, I use Adobe Fresco.

MR: Okay. So it sounds like maybe you're not doing as much board work as maybe you have in the past if your Neulands are getting old and they're getting frayed.

EM: Well, those are the fine ones. I still have the number ones and the big ones that I use for the board work. But yeah, board work has definitely decreased over the years.

MR: Hmm. There's an interesting company called Art Toolkit. We interviewed the person who runs that right in Oregon, up the coast, I think Port Townsend. I'm not sure how that looks.

EM: Oh yeah, that's in Washington.

MR: So that's in Washington. That's Maria Coryell-Martin.

EM: Oh, cool.

MR: She does something called Art Toolkit. She's really interesting. You'd probably really vibe with her. She went on expeditions and so she kept on squeezing her tools down. She's into—

EM: Oh, wow.

MR: - watercolor. But what she's produced now is like these little zip up books with the nylon, like ballistic nylon cover. Inside you can put whatever notebook you want and then these little square tins and you can buy the colors you want. They're magnetic.

EM: Oh yeah, I've seen those.

MR: And you snap 'em in this little thing. And then they include a water, like a syringe. So you could suck up water from a stream and then you can do water coloring with it.

EM: That's so cool. I haven't tried that yet.

MR: They make little kits. It's called Art Toolkit. We'll put a link in the show notes and then link to her interview. That's kind of cool if someone's listening or watching it into outdoors.

EM: Yeah.

MR: I've got one that she sent me and I took it on a train trip we did with our family and it was a lot of fun. I need to do more outdoor stuff so I can actually use the dumb thing so I don't feel like I've lived up to her expectations, but she's always really nice about that, so.

EM: That's cool.

MR: Well, that's really cool. We typically do tips. I don't even remember what tips we did back in the old days.

EM: Me either.

MR: The way I frame it is someone's listening or watching, they're a visual thinker, whatever that means to them, and maybe they've hit a plateau or they're just stuck. What would you say to someone like that to encourage them or to give 'em ideas for how to maybe break out of it or do something new?

EM: I would say just keep experimenting. I've been doing visualization for almost 10 years and I feel like I've hit those plateaus before. And sometimes the experimentation looks bad and it feels bad, and it feels like you're stepping backwards, but that's actually making progress. So just keep experimenting is my advice.

MR: Cool. Gimme two other tips.

EM: Ooh, two other tips.

MR: I wanna go for three. See if I can get two more outta 'ya.

EM: Ooh, let's see.

MR: Kind of on the spot. Sorry.

EM: I would say maybe try something outside of your practice, but still creative. Take a pottery class. Go for a photography, outdoor walk, or just something creative that you wouldn't normally sign up for. 'Cause I think so much of our creative advice really translate across fields, and sometimes it's fun to go eavesdrop on another field and see what you can learn from it.

MR: For me that's been learning how to bake bread and make pizza.

EM: Oh my gosh, you're pizza. I'm gluten free now, so every time I see it—

MR: Well, we're going gluten free, so we're having to figure that out.

EM: No.

MR: Yeah. I think we're going sourdough probably, so that helps. But yeah, that was my experimental space too. And I think it's important to be a beginner somewhere. And then you can, like, I've always talked about overlaying, so the sketchnoting skill overlaid on something like for you birding or cycling or hiking or whatever travel, your travel work that you've done.

EM: I think one last tip would be just be very careful of when sketchnoting becomes work. So whether it feels like work because it's too big, too intimidating, too complex or if it's work because maybe you're starting to do it professionally. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware of when it starts to feel like work and then find something else to supplement that joy factor. The sketch noting can have joy, but if work is attached to it, maybe there's something else to fill the joy bucket.

MR: Yeah, that switches the pressure which isn't helpful sometimes. Two things I wanted to mention before we go. Number one, you got a great book, the Art of Visual Note Taking. Tell us a little bit about the status of that now. 'Cause I think when we first had you on, it was brand new. I think maybe it launched or it was close to launching. Maybe it was just before it launched. And now it's been a while. Tell us how long it's been out and how it's selling and what's your experience?

EM: It turned five years old in March.

MR: Wow.

EM: Or May sometime last spring or this spring. My publishing numbers are always six months behind. My last numbers were 19,700. Somewhere there.

MR: Wow, that's great.

EM: It's doing pretty good. My agent called me a while back and he was saying it's time to start thinking about book number two, but I'm actually pretty stuck there. I don't know what to write about next. I don't have an inspiring idea. I have a post-it system that I use every week. My back burner section is just stuff that I should think about. And my second book idea is just always in the percolation section.

MR: Sometimes it just has to percolate for a while.

EM: Oh, yeah. I don't wanna rush it.

MR: Yep. And then the other thing I was gonna mention too was, I really loved when you traveled to Sweden and Norway and I think Finland and Scotland or something like that.

EM: Yeah. We went to six countries in three weeks.

MR: I couldn't keep up, but you did really beautiful. And I think you were experimenting with those notebooks you talked about, right?

EM: Yep.

MR: The ones that could either be vertical or horizontal. Tell us what was that experience like?

EM: I've looked at travel sketchnotes a lot and I was so inspired and I wanted to do it. That was my first time in Europe and traveling overseas, so I really wanted to capture it. And so I made a commitment, I have to sketch every day. Before I go to sleep, I have to sketch at least one page.

MR: Something.

EM: It doesn't have to be a whole spread, but knowing me it's just like overdone and there's like five pages for day one. So I had to actually adjust expectations and like simple down instead of just overdoing it 'cause it's like, "I'm jet lagged, I wanna go to bed really bad right now. I'm just gonna do one page." I was kind of taking care of myself at the same time, but wanting to document visually in a journal so I can remember what we did and where we went.

I had pages where it was a traditional sketchnote where it's like little popcorns with a path of the time. Then I had others that was just text with a little icon here and there. I really had fun and played with it. I have spreads that are all realistic sketches and then I have pages with cartoons. It's just kind of everything.

MR: It was fun for me to go through and see your experimentation and how you're changing. I think later on you got sick.

EM: Yeah, we got.

MR: So you were dealing with like, "Okay, I made this agreement I have to do. What if you're sick, how do you deal with that?" How did you deal with that?

EM: I don't know what I had, whether it was flu or COVID or something like that, but we got to Scotland, and I was just fevery. We got off the plane and it was raining and the rain felt so good. It was just like, oh, thank goodness we're in a cold place 'cause Paris was so hot. We landed, we got to the Airbnb and I just slept for like three days.

MR: Wow.

EM: I did not sketch. I thought about it. I was like—

MR: I think that's probably where you can let yourself outta that agreement.

EM: I did, and so then I caught up afterwards. I left a couple blank pages saying, "Okay, nothing happened. I was in bed for three days." We'll just—

MR: Draw the picture of you in bed.

EM: - I'll just do a journal entry there. Then we went to Berwick-upon-Tweed for a little half day trip. And I started that sketch the next day. Then after we got home, that's when I did the journaling about being sick 'cause it was less interesting.

MR: And then you could reflect on it a little bit—

EM: Yeah.

MR: - in a way. Yeah, that was really cool. I thought that was a lot of fun. We'll, of course, include the link to the book and the travel sketchnotes so people can check it out. Well, it's been so good to have you on the show in this unusual setting.

EM: Thanks, Mike. And always a pleasure to listen and be on the sketchnote Army podcast.

MR: Yeah, not a problem. So for whoever's watching or listening, this wraps another episode. Till next time, talk to you soon.

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