This is a continuation of yesterday’s blogpost on the Graphic Facilitation workshop i attended in Rossland, B.C. Idgie’s is the restaurant some of the participants and facilitators ate at on the second night. The food was AWESOME and the company was excellent.  It’s always such fun to get to know people after the workshop, find out what makes them tick, what their passion is etc.

On the third night a group was heading out to a Japanese restaurant.  I was going to join them however i decided to honour my feelings and take some time to myself. My head was going to explode with all of the information and busyness that i needed alone time.  So I walked around the charming town of Rossland (after a quick dinner at the local pub) and snapped photos of things that interested me.  This hammock sure beckoned me!  Doesn’t it look inviting?

More of the Circle/lines exercise – check out the orbs in this photo!

One fun little exercise we did was the teabag experiment.  We plopped a water logged teabag onto a page and after the splotch dried we drew around it to “make something out of it”. I found it to be quite fun and as usual i had a conversation with the splotch to see what it wanted to be – mine was the strange bird like creature.

A full on view of my symbols/icon page.  I need to work on thickening my lines – i enjoyed this exercise!

We broke out into groups of 4 and then had to create a piece together – that was a bit of a challenge.  We were given little sticky notes with drawings done by other students which depicted something – we figured ours was about balance and set about creating a “finding balance” piece. Interestingly enough we had to “balance” ourselves while we tried drawing on top of each other!

One group created a fun and decorative piece called The Circus is coming to town. I love how they pulled everything together into one colourful and dynamic graphic recording.

Brandy – one of the participants created this wonderful piece after we all listened to this inspiring 3 minute TED Talk by Matt Cutts on “Try Something new for 30 Days” As you can imagine it’s quite challenging trying to capture all of the info from one short talk.  I think Brandy did a brilliant job of it!  We did have some time after the talk to fill in the details.

For one of the exercises I got up and told a 5 minute story of how our family immigrated from Morocco to Canada.  I can’t recall whose piece this is but i love all of the imagery they used to tell the story. The short story was full of vivid imagery of escape, trains, ships, Mounties, Rocky Mountains, Morocco/civil war, My Mom and her apron and 2 scared toddlers.

Anni created this lovely piece!  The heart in the middle extends beyond the orange tree – my maiden name is Naranjo which means Orange tree in Spanish.

This is an illustration i created for our “Graphic Facilitators toolbox”. Rather than write down what tools we needed Nancy White asked us go to “the wall” and record it!  How clever is that?  I didn’t have the chance to colour in my heading. One funny thing – Nancy told us to dress in comfy clothes when we are recording and NOT wear thongs – when you bend over they would show beyond your pants and that’s a no- no and a distraction!  Ha!

One tool often used in graphic facilitation is sticky notes.  On this wall we grouped together what we had learned over the course of the 3 day workshop.  It’s a great way to synthesis it all!

Here i am thumbing through one of Nancy’s books – it’s the Usborne book of Drawing Doodling and Colouring This book is one I’d like to get – to be inspired to create some fanciful things!  I found myself looking through Nancy’s books saying to myself “Need it, need it, want it, have it, have it…….”

I won’t bore you with anymore photos of the conference!  I do however urge you to get outside of your comfort zone and learn something new. It will definitely impact your work and expand your options!  I have a feeling you’ll be seeing and noticing a lot more graphic facilitation used in different disciplines! It’s a wonderful way to remember complex ideas!