Sketchollage – a new creative way to express ideas, notes and experiences in your sktechnotes.

Recently my friends Marie-Andrée Ouimet and Sylvia Duckworth inspired me to start sketchnoting. It’s basically like taking creative digital notes with drawings, logos, sketches and shapes mixed with handwriting. I’ve made a few now, they can be found here.

Sketchnoting is a way for me to sit back, decompress and wind down from a busy day. I can let my creativity go wild, even with my almost inexistent art/drawing skills. Despite my new love for this new hobby, I was realizing that my lack of artistic skills was making it harder and taking much longer for me to really express myself in my sketchnotes.  Not being able to depict people, the core of all of this being my PLN & relationships, made me think my sketchnote was missing some key aspects.

I wanted to paint a picture to convey my experience at the Bring IT Together (#BIT16) conference over the past 2 days…wait…”paint a PICTURE”…hummm…why not add photos into a sketchnote to help convey what happened at the conferece that way?

That’s where Sketchollage was born, it’s a mix of SKETCHNOTING & PHOTO COLLAGE. I feel pretty good about my first attempt because I was able to add photos of the sessions and capture smiles and energy on my camera then put it all together. Furthermore, it’s fun to add borders, frames, speech bubbles and designs over the photos, kind of like a digital scrapbooking.

Here’s my first ever sketchollage, it’s a mashup of my 2 days in Niagara Falls presenting and learning at #BIT16:

I am going to continue to sketch-smash and include photos in my sketchnotes from now on when I can!

If you try it, make sure to use the hashtag #Sketchollage and please share it with me, I’d love to see all of the creativity out there!

Happy sketchollaging….!!