Simply Sunday - Sketchnoting podcasts, five minutes, and more

Overthinking, sketchnoting podcast episodes, and five-minute wisdom from an old podcast, plus Illustrate Your Week prompts

Hello, and happy Sunday!

Today is about taking tiny steps on a big project, the perils of overthinking, erasing, and undoing, and a reminder of the virtues of learning by doing and being gentle with oneself in the process. It is also about the power in finding and claiming five-minute windows, looking at your time and identifying little pockets that you might be able to use differently.

Today:

• Sketchnoting and “five-minute windows”

• Illustrate Your Week prompts for Week 27

• An extra “creative life” list for July

• Some beautiful lines I read this week

• And more

I’ve moved an assortment of general check-in notes to the bottom. That way you can drop right into the creative talk…. and stick around for the real-world threads at the end, if you want.

Thank you for reading.

Sketchnoting Episode 454

Sketchnoting old episodes of the Creativity Matters Podcast has been a goal of mine for a long time. I’ve always thought that distilling each show into a visual note would be a powerful extension and a fitting creative project.

The problem with 17 years of podcast episodes is that we can’t just flip back to find the lines we love, the mentions of this or that, the connections between all the shows, the number of times certain topics or phrases or challenges have  come up. We don’t have little bent corners or bookmarks or notes in the margins. We can’t just open the book back up to a certain page or sticky note and reread a meaningful line.

When did I last talk about that little wooden pencil with the colored leads strapped to the sides? How many times have I talked about kaleidoscopes or wandering or scones and lemon curd? What did I say about the bougainvillea that day? How many times have I mentioned the fantastic Here, or Maira Kalman, or Danny Gregory?

Listeners just go on. They listen, and they move on to the next show in their queue. The words, so carefully crafted at times, so raw and spilling at others, so woven and threaded and layered, are gone.

As a listener, and not even a very good listener, I understand. That’s how I listen, too.¹

As a writer, the words continue to swim and circle, float and drift, often in wispy little clouds, echoes, fragments.

Cataloging or indexing the podcast is something I would love to do. I would love to crank out some statistics, do some frequency analysis, map the connections, but it’s a mammoth project, one I know I don’t have time to tackle. There are already so many things I can’t fit in. Plus, what’s the value?

Indexing 400+ episodes may not make sense, but I’ve always wanted to develop a process for sketchnoting shows, new and old. I have always imagined a collection of podcast sketchnotes, the shows made visual, the highlights captured on the page, a combination of notes and illustration. Even before I had ever heard of “sketchnoting,” I was doing it now and then, summarizing the key points on a single page, mostly in words. I’ve always thought that a visual cheat sheet for each show would be helpful and would, somehow, give the shows more concrete and lasting form.

It was always a pipe dream project, but tackling it on paper was too big, too big and too slow. Unlike real-time sketchnotes where speed has a lot to do with form, I don’t have to do episode sketchnotes quickly (or in real time). I can stop and start and rewind. So each note, in concept, becomes a larger project and more time consuming. I also worried that there would always be an issue with needing to “redo” or “edit” things and that it would be complicated for pen and ink notes.

I kept putting the sketchnotes off.

But then I started thinking that doing the sketchnotes digitally might work. [Insert here a few hundred hours of research and debate and justification and soul searching and dozens of hours watching videos about note taking apps and then dozens of hours experimenting with my digital sketchnoting approach and dozens of hours wasting time with a pointless game…. when I should have been working on bringing this project to light and seeing where it goes.]

Ultimately, all those hours landed me, this week, admitting that I needed to stop wasting time, that I didn’t have any reason to keep putting off this project. 

I do find it awkward to listen to my old shows, but there is something compelling in these notes. I feel the pull of them and am curious what the years of the CMP might look like when illustrated this way. I can see these as a collection. Can you?

Just for a Few Minutes

One morning this week, I decided to work on a sketch note I had started the night before. I thought I would just work on it a bit, a few minutes, and then shift to writing for the morning. The maybe two hours I am finding in the mornings before work now sometimes seem expansive. I feel like I can get so many things done in this window before I turn on my work light (which really isn’t a heart light, although I can’t stop the Neil Diamond words from floating through my mind and, of course, I simultaneously flash on an image of E.T. in the closet full of stuffed animals). 

The show I sketchnoted wasn’t the one I had planned to do. Somehow, I ended up listening to Episode 454, which is only a few years old.  It is a show about using five minutes of morning to do some freeform doodles one year during a monthlong daily ink challenge. The show leapfrogged back to the five minutes I had spent every morning a few years before that sitting, parked somewhere outside my son’s high school, and drawing a house. 

I thought I would just spend a few minutes on the sketch note, but I used all of my time, the whole window of morning time and beyond.

I have a lot to learn, and I am finding that digital is really challenging precisely because I can write everything and then erase it and write it again. My perfectionist tendencies are shining strong with digital sketchnoting, for sure, which is silly. 

I am working on it.

I wrote and rewrote sections and letters and words multiple times in creating this single sketch note of Episode 454. I know that if I was sketchnoting in person, things would not always be perfectly neat or perfectly lettered. But digital invites this process of redoing, of nudging things, of refining. 

I am still settling into how my lettering looks digitally, what sizes I like in my tools, how tall I want to make my letters, and how zoomed in I need to be to get the silky inky feel to lettering that I find so very satisfying. My notes are still mostly text, but I am trying to build in more illustration and not overthink that step. (Ironically, I am overthinking the lettering more than the illustrations. I feel good about the simple illustrations I’ve added.) 

I have a lot to learn, but I think the best way for me to continue to build this skill and develop my voice in sketchnoting is to keep doing it. So that’s my personal challenge — just keep doing it. (I do worry that I’ll improve and want to go back and redo the early notes, but I’m not going to let this stop me. I want to see this collection start to grow.)

Finding and Claiming Pockets of Time

I don’t really expect to find strands of gold in each show. But, I found Episode 454 to be a really good show. Whether you listened before or you are new to the podcast or you didn’t even know there is a podcast, you might want to check this episode out. It’s a solid advocation of taking, making, and claiming five-minute windows, even if you already have a solid art habit at some other time of day. It’s also a reminder that sometimes we drift from our paths, and the drift can be so imperceptible that we don’t realize it is happening. Or, you might be aware of it and still somehow unable to tether yourself to a star that will keep you on the path. Luckily, finding your way back can be as simple as finding five minutes.

(This theme of drifting recurs in many shows. Even recently I’ve talked about this because I know that as much as I enjoy where I am in my illustrated journal process, I know that I have drifted a bit off course. We may find our styles and approaches drift, but we also often drift from the habits and routines that we put in place and think will be lasting anchors. Drifting can be very subtle, and then, suddenly, you wake up and realize you don’t know where you are or how you got so far off track.)

I hope you will give it a listen, and give a five-minute window a try.

Here are my sketchnotes for Episode 454.

Because there are limits on the length of a post, I had to move the sketchnotes to a separate page. I hope you will click through to take a look. (They could change, and I see things I missed or lost in my tinkering, but I made being able to share them today my goal.)

I am embedding the podcast episode below, in case you want to listen. This episode is from 2021.

(I talk about sketchnoting often, but if you are interested in learning more, start with Mike Rohde’s The Sketchnote Handbook. It’s excellent. I also recommend Emily Mills’ The Art of Visual Notetaking: An interactive guide to visual communication and sketchnoting. Dive in with old podcasts…. Episode 251 and Episode 254.)

---

Episode 454 of the Creativity Matters podcast, Five Minutes

(Show notes)

---

A Creative Life List for July

I didn’t realize I was going to make or post this list. But it fits with my current mindset, and so I did. I hope you’ll play long!

A Creative Life List for July

---

Illustrate Your Week — Week 27

The new prompts for Week 27 have been posted.

---

Final Notes

I made a library pit stop on my way home from my meeting to pick up my stack of reserves. Two of my holds were by Liniers, the illustrator who did Written and Drawn by Henrietta, a book I mentioned a few weeks ago. I sat at the library and looked through The Big Wet Balloon and Good Night, Planet. These short cartoon books are both very sweet.

• The Big Wet Balloon: An older sister entertains her sister on a rainy day, encouraging a spirit of adventure. When they see a rainbow, Matilda (the older sister) says they have to give it something colorful and gives it Clemmie’s red balloon.

• Good Night, Planet: Very sweet story of a little girl and her stuffed animal, Planet, who gets up after she goes to sleep and has an adventure with the family dog and a neighborhood mouse. They try to catch the moon, the largest cookie, and then share some real cookies. (I love, love, love the cover art for this book.)

Grab these at your library to share with kids in your life.

The Big Wet Balloon brought the Stella books (by Marie-Louise Gay) to mind for me, books like Stella, Princess of the Sky, Stella, Star of the Sea, Stella, Queen of the Snow, and Stella, Fairy of the Forest. I always had a soft spot for the stories of Stella with her red hair and her brother Sam.

I hope you are reading something inspiring and good for you and, if this is your context, something wonderful with your kids, too. Let me know what you are reading right now.

Real World Threads

How was your week? It felt like a mixed bag here.

• The oven locked and wouldn’t open. And then, thinking I could outsmart what is probably a fried circuit board, I pressed enough buttons that the internal fan came on and wouldn’t go off. I turned off the power at the circuit breaker, hoping it would reset things, but as soon as I turned it on again, the fan started and wouldn’t shut off. So, the oven is permanently off. We haven’t been able to cook at temperatures higher than 350 for the last year because of a broken “up” button. But now, we can’t even do that. (Some of you might remember another silly oven story and some duct tape. Same oven.)

• I forgot to wake someone up, on a Sunday, and it resulted in the need to withdraw from a summer class. I woke someone else up too early on the same day, and then completely forgot to wake the other.

• I took the car for service and was told that the reason the brakes squeal so badly is simply because we don’t drive enough.

• I drove to an in-person meeting. It was 49 degrees when I left my house, so my wool dress and fleece jacket (to completely cover up) were perfect, but it was almost 70 when I got there. And sunny. My Caprese sandwich was good, but I was the only one who hadn’t ordered turkey. Sounds about right.

• I posted a bunch of things on a local “buy nothing” list and was able to give away four giant bags of yarn from the basement. Nothing else I listed got taken this time, but I felt really good about all this yarn finding new life in elementary school classrooms, in the hands of a young girl who is enjoying making “God’s eye” pieces (which I had to look up), and for someone who simply wanted to try a certain kind of yarn. I also took a box of fleece blankets (each that folded up into an attached pocket) and 35 fleece hats to a local charity. We made these years ago when we were optimistic, hopeful, and trying to start a creative sideline. This is the last of the pieces, I think. A box of twenty or so blankets recently went to someone who was going to take them to a dog shelter. All of these things have felt good. Can you tell these things are gone? Not really. The space just seems to reconfigure itself and refill. But I know. I see the subtle signs of thinning, of winnowing. I think I might even be winning.

• The forgetting frightens me.

• I thought a lot this week about the realities of “out of sight, out of mind.”

• One day, I wrote, “I need to write less about me.”

And yet here I am.

Thank You for Seeing Me

I thought things were short this week. I guess not. Long or short, I so appreciate that you are here and that some of you have shared the substack and tried to help people find me. I think sometimes I’m just really, really hard to spot. It’s funny, in hindsight, I drew a simple giraffe in my Week 25 pages, and I wrote next to it, “Lessons in invisibility.” It felt apt. But then I countered that, the internal battle playing out in little block letters on the page. In a small space on the other side, I wrote, “Don’t you mean graceful?” (It was supposed to say “don’t you mean grace,” as in “don’t you mean lessons in grace.” Lettering sometimes has a mind of its own.)

A portion of an illustrated journal page, Amy Cowen, 2023.

I am not good at playing the game. I always feel awkward about the game. I never quite settle into feeling like the nice words are real. I never quite let my guard down. I sometimes feel that I wear my skin inside out, and, at the same time, I cover up. I’m never sure why people read. Of all the thousands of options, why me? There are many people I am trying to avoid, turning the other way when I spot them in the grocery, and trying just “not to look” as they share their awesome lives. I don’t want everyone to find me. The image of these people, people who I’m sure don’t give me a passing thought, keeps me flying under the radar, covering up, unable somehow to claim my skin, relax, reach out.

I hope you have a good Sunday.

Amy

PS -

A few beautiful lines this week I read in other substack posts:

• “I’m limping home, now, happy, with a black eye. Transient, frail, almost fifty – I am a collection of found experiences plus love given away. Guaranteed uncertainty. Without an answer. Softer than a surfboard.” (Nightcap with Tift Merritt)

• “Outside in the street, there is a music festival happening. There is a DJ, the music so loud that the notes are coming in through the glass of the closed windows and the bass is coming up through the furniture and the floor boards. We walk through the blaring world like this, the oblivious, reveling, full-of-teeth world, bearing our little tragedies in our tender little cups.” (A Writer’s Notebook)

• "I am caught in the tension of wanting to know and not wanting to be sure. Of wanting to be out there and not wanting to be known. Of wanting a blueprint and not wanting to be restricted. Of wanting discomfort and not wanting unease. Of wanting to know the answers and not wanting to pre-empt the ending." (Rewild)

I love seeing that some of you have followed Trish Tales. The world of daily diary comics and personal graphic novels is really important to me. I love what Trish is doing! I look forward each night to seeing her daily installment. I hope you’ll take a look and follow, too.

Thank you for reading the Illustrated Life substack. Please consider subscribing (for free) to receive the weekly email. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader! Paid options are available for those who want to support the substack, the podcast, and #illustrateyourweek. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time donations are always appreciated.

(Please note: Links to books or tools referenced in posts are Amazon affiliate links that help support these projects.)

1. I do know there are paid services that can help you annotate your listening. I also realize that show notes could or should offer some of what I’m talking about, and there are tools like Obsidian that might work to highlight connections.