If you’ve been reading the Come and See column for very long, you know how important I think drawing by hand is. All of us have known how to draw from the day we could hold a spoon. We made patterns in spilled food, we made shapes with our fingers in the condensation on our backseat car windows, we covered our school notebooks with cartoon characters, and as adults we doodle during meetings.
Over time, though, many of us stopped drawing. No doubt digital devices played a role, but I fear that, somewhere along the line, a parent or teacher or someone else we looked up to taught us that we simply weren’t good enough to keep at it. For those of you reading this who say, “But I can’t draw!” my response is: Yes, you can!
Back At It
I encourage you to get back at it. Here are a few ideas to keep you sketching worship visuals:
- Kid Collaboration: I wonder if the reason we think so highly of art done by kids is that it reminds us of a time when we too were uninhibited. There’s joy in kids’ art, and even more when they tell us about it. What if you had a few kids and a few adults work on the same paper or whiteboard and let each inspire and refine each other’s work? They could even use sidewalk chalk in the parking lot!
- Prompts: A search for “drawing prompts” online will bring up thousands of ideas to get you drawing. In time, you won’t need these prompts and will instinctively add drawings alongside or in place of your words.
- Ditch Digital: If you usually boot up your computer to solve a visual problem, try putting pen to paper first. Yes, the computer can help with amazing visuals, but in the early stages of creating, the computer will quickly narrow your focus to details rather than the free flow of ideas that sketching can produce.
- Graphic Scribes: There’s a whole industry of people who draw in real time during a meeting. They’re called graphic recorders or graphic facilitators. A combination of words and graphics are drawn on large sheets of paper, white boards, or sometimes on a computer tablet with the image projected. Take a page from their book. For a devotion sometime, have your youth group respond to the Bible text with pictures and words on large sheets of chart paper or on a white board—the bigger the better.
If you’re not yet convinced, look up “the picture superiority effect.” Pictures, we’ve learned, are more memorable than words alone. Why? When someone sees a picture, their mind not only remembers the image, but associates a word or phrase with the picture. Do you have something you’d like people to remember? Look for (or create!) pictures to help.