But before that, just a reminder that this weekend I’m participating in the MS Society’s Chesapeake Challenge walk, so it’s your last chance to make a donation for a free pet portrait. It’s looking like it will be a bit of a scorcher out there too…  Get all the details here, and do it today!

I’m going to make a confession here: I love school. I’ve always loved school. I like taking classes, I like learning new things, I’d probably be in school forever if I could. One of the things I like about taking classes is that it’s quiet time to sit back and passively take new ideas in, giving the parts of my brain that are always solving problems a little break.

If it’s a lot of factual information, I’m actually not all that passive about it. (I am one of nature’s obsessive note-takers. And not the interesting, oh-so-pretty artistic kind of notes. I filled an entire steno pad with my cramped chicken-scratch at the last training conference I attended.)

But if it’s more abstract, theoretical, or subjective information, I don’t write a lot of notes down. That’s when my pen does other things.

Sketches like these actually help me focus and process what’s being said when either a) it’s not something that I need to capture exact phrases for or b) I’m starting to zone out and would otherwise be falling asleep. I’ll typically keep a separate page — or as in this case a separate notepad — handy to separate these meanderings, a habit I picked up in high school when a rather nasty math teacher kept yelling at me about doodling in my notebook. (I got straight A’s in that class, you bitter old hag!)

This time around it wasn’t Shakespeare or philosophy or even math, but a training seminar at my office. It was a good seminar, but loooong 4-hour sessions meant I needed to stay focused. So, time to sketch! Fortunately I have plenty of little sketchpads in my office, gleaned from years of attending design conferences. 🙂

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my Sketchbook Project book with me, because I really liked how some of these came out. It was a 4-day class, so there are more sketches to come!