Street Art

Walking along the streets of any major city of the world, one cannot miss the graffiti on the walls of buildings or boundaries. Traditionally, graffiti has been used as a form of a protest and in a lot of cases it is still the same cause and in others, it has been beautification for the arterial roads of cities. For instance, a small city in the eastern part of India, that happens to be my hometown, hosted the Men’s Hockey World Cup in 2018. I couldn’t get enough of the vibrant graffiti on the walls that added an aesthetic value to all the major roads leading to the venue of the world cup.

In an attempt to learn sketchnoting and getting faster and better at it, I am trying to be a regular at the virtual sketchnote hangouts. This time we discussed the street art in some of the major cities of the world- Milan, Berlin, Phuket and Cairo. The walls have posed as large canvases for conveying messages of love, peace and harmony in various forms. Abstract or concrete, pictures or words (calligraphy), many of these forms and more have been used for graffiti.

Learning a new skill

Two months into lockdown and wondering if life is going to be back to ‘normal’ ever. I started working out like a mad person to keep my mind off from the highs and lows of nothingness. One good thing– the workout has helped achieve goals that I have been procrastinating for the last 3 years. The 10kgs weight loss that I had been planning (more hoping) has finally made some headway. A little over 8 kilos lost. That is a significant loss considering my laziness and the obvious mastery of procrastination.

That wasn’t enough to keep myself occupied throughout the day and like everybody else I was doom scrolling in the initial days of lockdown. But social media has helped in certain ways. I bumped into people who do ‘sketch noting’. I had no clue such a word existed and that there is a whole bunch of people in the world who do this for a living. Discovering this way of recording was as amazing. I am still learning baby steps and I am yet to find an optimum balance of what to put-on the paper while sketch noting. But it works perfect for a person like me who is scarred by the pursuit of perfection and hence never gets anything done. At least this way, I managed to put my imperfections on the paper yet convey the required message. Added a couple of sketch notes from the learning sessions with Rob Dimeo who generously spent his lunchtime teaching people how to go about sketch noting from scratch.