hand sketching

I recently lead a practice with the Ladies That UX Atlanta chapter titled, “How to NOT Die Doing UX” and as part of my presentation I really wanted to showcase some clean black and white sketches to go along with the topics. Lately, I’ve seen so many presentations using AI generated images and I am personally really tired of seeing this slop – so I made my own graphics, like I’ve been doing for YEARS!! In the process I realized how much I missed the process. Not because I am using AI images, but because I’ve not been presenting and creating like this for a long time.

So, using my old iPad Pro and Apple pencil, I grabbed reference images for different parts of the presentation and made simple line drawings of them. Here’s what I came up with!!

Another thing I realized is that I tend to only sketch things like this when I am doing them for other people as part of me being “productive”. I got so much joy out of the process and hate that it ebbs and flows based on deadlines and audiences. There are so many things I’ve wanted to sketch, draw, and create over the years, but I’ve almost always stopped the personal projects because they didn’t align with a business value on the other side. I don’t have many hobbies to call my own that are just for fun (something I am working on) and I know I want to do more of these line drawings. No pressure on myself to be more productive, but maybe a tiny bit of pressure to be more artistically engaged with myself.