Drawing Sketchnotes – Easier and better with the right pens

With Sketchnotes, you can easily prepare complicated content or long presentations. To do so, you use a combination of text and illustrations.

The drawings in the Sketchnotes should be clear and informative rather than artistically exacting. The combination of text and image makes statements easy to grasp but still detailed – and several images produced as a series or cluster make even complicated facts comprehensible. If you’d like to find out more about creating Sketchnotes, you’ve come to the right place.

Sketchnotes are a creative way to produce notes for lectures or events of any kind. They help to focus on the essential statements and record what has been heard in an easily comprehensible form. If you need to look at your Sketchnotes later, you’ll definitely remember what they’re about straightaway – and much more easily than if you’d written the content down.

A combination of image and text is better suited as a memory aid.

It’s up to you what you use Sketchnotes for. But you can present anything in the form of Sketchnotes that you would normally write down in words. The advantage: with Sketchnotes, you also end up with a clearly structured topic. Recipes, instructions, information about a topic – you can record all this in a Sketchnote.

In order to quickly create accurate drawings, you can practise drawing common shapes and objects that require just a few strokes. In this way, you can build up a vocabulary of imagery and will be able to illustrate very quickly and efficiently. You’ll also have a pool of signs whose meaning readers can grasp effortlessly.

If you want, you can also add colour to your Sketchnotes, either subtle and subdued or strong colours. It can also look great to work with various grey tones and use shading in various different ways.

If possible, the colour should be less of a decorative element and more an element that supports the statement.

It can, for example, be sensible to colour in individual characters such as exclamation marks, stop signs or warning signs in red. This means that they will be much more of a visual focus. You can highlight a bulb in yellow, identifying important information at a glance.

Whether you produce your Sketchnotes in black or use other colours also depends how they will be used: if your sketch notes are to be photocopied, it makes sense to not use colour because then the copy will be the best reproduction of the original.

If you prefer it to be more artistic, you can also use watercolours or lettering in the Sketchnotes and position the text around them. This will give your Sketchnote an individual touch. The best way to do this is to use Brush Pens like the ABT Dual Brush Pen or the Fudenosuke.

If you also include handlettering elements in your Sketchnotes, it is recommended to work with Brush Pens such as the water-based ABT Dual Brush Pens or a Fudenosuke. With these, you can achieve beautiful, sweeping lettering. 

Erasers and correction tapes can be used to correct the drawing if you make a small error. If you want to revise the image again at the end, a correction roller is ideal. As it is a dry corrector, you can immediately write or draw on the corrected area again.