Taking Notes — Draw Daily

LESSON SIX

A Place to Keep Your Notes

First, and most importantly, you need a place to keep all of your notes and accompanying drawings so they are easily accessible and retrievable. This can look like keeping your notes and drawings all together in a sketchbook or doing the same thing in a digital notebook on your computer or tablet. You could just use a regular notebook, although the paper isn’t great for thumbnails and sketches.

My preferred method, is a binder with lined paper interspersed with blank computer paper, or light card stock where you can take your notes, you can easily rearrange, remove, or add pages, you can keep drawings right next to your notes, and you can even add printouts of relevant information all in one place.

Below you can find two examples of my own notes taken from Drawing Basics and Video Game Art by Chris Solarski from 2015. The third image shows a page of notes I took from Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael D. Mattesi along side a print out of a page from Mattesi’s book.

I’ve been able to keep these notes safe for almost 10 years (which is why it’s so yellow) stored away and ready to be pulled at any time.

Organized Notes

Much like a book, pamphlet, or website your notes should be organized in a way that makes them easier to review or refer back to later on. This is one of the reasons why you should review the materials BEFORE you start taking notes because this habit will help you keep your notes better organized. You aren’t looking for perfection, but it does help to be tidy.

Notes may include:

Different sized text differentiating between titles and regular text
Line spacing or line skipping so different sections are isolated
Underlined or highlighted text makes that text easier to spot
Bullet notes or numbering for lists
Asterisks, quotes, or italics when you want to add a note, quote a resource, or indicate the title and author of a book, video, or painting.
Arrows to connect related or subsequent information that might be separated
Sticky notes, tab markers, etc…. to mark sections, chapters, or specific information
Your own thoughts, insights, or realizations summarizing each section
You can also include additional information that you recall from previous lessons or other resources when you are able, which helps you to associate new information with other things you’ve already learned