The Basics

Active Learning

When talking about the skill it requires to be an effective learner, note taking is not necessarily one people are good at, nor one that most people utilize when reading or viewing how to draw content. People consume but do little to interact with it. With this in mind, let’s get deeper into how we can put Active Learning into action. 

A Place to Keep Your Notes

First, and most importantly, this means having 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.

Notes Can Be Stored With Accompanying Sketches
Notes Can Be Stored With Accompanying Sketches
Printed Pages Can Be Added To Notes

Interacting with Your Source Material

How you interact with your resource is just as important as what that resource is. Once you’ve chosen it, the only way forward is to start interacting with it. Regardless if that resource is a video, a book, a podcast, a tutorial, or even just a quick tip from Instagram or TikTok, step one is to choose a comfortable length of that material, be it a number of pages or a certain length of video, and absorb what it has to say. At this step, your only job is to obtain and internalize that information. 

For your second step - once you’ve hit the end of that duration and you feel like you’ve properly understood it - you are going to parse through it a second time to take notes. This is important because at this point you can start to make decisions about what parts you copy down and what parts aren’t worth noting.