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How to draw ideas

ralphammer.com

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Re: How to draw ideas

#2

Post by mistermann »

FTA:

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After we have taken in as much information as possible, we now want to go “crazy” and draw as many ideas as possible.

But what if our mind goes blank and we don’t have any?

Then we still need to draw.

Ok, but what?

Anything! Just put that pen on the paper and keep it moving. Scribble, make random marks and shapes. This will kickstart our visual thinking process. rough sketches

And what are we thinking about? New plant pots of course! We draw everything that comes to mind. Everything! Those drawings just keep pouring from our mind through our hands on that sheet of paper. We have created a loop where our imaginations turn into drawings and those drawings initiate new imaginations.

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This is eerily similar to (my understanding) of how AI image generation works.

Re: How to draw ideas

#3

Post by girafffe_i »

My dev team has now spent more of their career without physical whiteboarding and seems to think of it as a waste of time, so I'm looking for more guides like this, as well as explanation of the psycho-mechanics of why this works.

My understanding is that we think in abstract (we'll say "shapes"), and then to interface with the world, we learn language to bucket objects into words and compost them to describe the "shapes".

I leverage visuals heavily whenever speaking with others (Miro, physical paper or whiteboards), and have trouble communicating with (smart) people who can hold a lot in their head while speaking at length about it without providing concrete references. The transformative process of people getting their thoughts out on paper means 1. they can share context and aren't referring to their "shapes" referentially in their head 2. more than 1 person can see their thoughts concretized and can share context, discuss, and re-shape the thoughts 3. the act of reabsorbing the concrete representation reveals incompleteness that others can contribute to (edge cases, weird use cases)

Re: How to draw ideas

#7

Post by kingkongjaffa »

Very fun! I’ve found sketching and journaling super valuable.

I follow the methods from https://bulletjournal.com/

My journal is full of different layouts, diagrams, decision making tables, for example doing a quick SWOT analysis on paper by diving a page into 4.

Paper is good and helpful for the process.

I’m continually trying to produce ‘evergreen notes” and writing on paper helps me push towards that a bit. (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes)

Re: How to draw ideas

#8

Post by SimDeBeau »

gradys wrote: post #5

Any recommendations for learning to draw at the level depicted in this article?

They actually link an article they wrote on some drawing exercises. https://ralphammer.com/a-quick-beginners-guide-to-drawing/ Remind me of a lot of what we did in some of my old beginner art classes.
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