Spring harvest

Whew, blogs are such a responsibility! Eager as I am to share my work with the world, keeping this thing up to date ends up just being one more Thing To Do in an already overheated schedule. But I'm not complaining! Au contraire, I'm very grateful to be kept fairly busy. Of course, at this stage of my career it's not all graphic recording that I'm being kept busy with – but each month I get a bit more graphic work than I had the month before, and I'm confident that it will continue to multiply.

I've got a whole spate of interesting gigs coming up, but meanwhile here's some work I did last month. This one was the outcome of a very fortuitous connection with Brenda Chaddock, facilitator extraordinaire, who invited me to do the graphic recording for a session she was facilitating for BC Healthy Communities (Vancouver Coastal Region). I started by doing something I hadn't done before, which was to prepare some custom chartwork in advance – in this case, a poster outlining the guidelines for hosting a World Cafe dialogue. I'm particularly pleased with this piece, as I think it's inviting and has a nice flow. (Click on the graphics to see larger images.)

One thing I especially enjoyed about this session was that I was very involved in the planning conversations, which allowed me to really integrate the graphics into the day and introduce a couple of innovations (or what seemed to me to be innovations, at any rate!) Brenda was going to start off the day by having people pair off, introduce themselves to each other, and talk about what called them to be there that day. I suggested we pass out paper and pens and ask folks to draw an image symbolizing how they were feeling as they came into the session – what kind of energy they were bringing with them. Brenda liked the idea and added it to the intro section. We wound up using sticky notes, which I collected, grouped into themes, and stuck on a large sheet of paper to create a kind of 'tapestry' of the collective energy in the room. This is what it looked like.

I like this piece not because it's particularly stunning visually, but because it creates more interaction between the people in the room and the graphics. Usually it's just me drawing and writing and recording people's comments – but this puts the pens in the hands of the participants and invites them to unleash their own 'inner artist'! This is something I want to bring into this work more and more. I'd really like to make as many of these pieces as possible a true co-creation between me and the other folks in the room – perhaps even others who weren't in the room at the time but are somehow involved in the process!

OK, I'm going into my mid-afternoon coma – time for a break, and I'll come back with more later.