Morgan Lindsey

ART 100B: Drawing I

Professor Burt

The Art of Note Taking

            After reading The Art of Note Taking, I started to look at taking notes differently. Normally when I would take a walk, I would have headphones in or be on my phone the whole time, during this walk I really tried to focus on taking in all my surroundings. Once reading The Art of Note Taking, I noticed how accurate the points made were. Whenever I take notes, they are just handwritten bullets or paragraphs. The only time I would ever have sketches for notes is for classes like art or when I needed to draw atoms and cells structures for chemistry and biology.

            In the first paragraph of Why Sketch by Jenny Keller she writes, “drawing makes you look more carefully at your subject.” This is very true. I never noticed how closely I look into details when I’m drawing compared to when I am just taking a picture or glancing at something for a moment. My first semester at UNE I had to do a plant journal and had to write an entry once a week about a plant that I had picked. During my walk I went back to the plant that I had studied. This time I looked more closely about the surrounding areas of the plant rather than just the plant itself.

            When you snap a picture you just look at what you can see, the visuals. For this walk I tried to focus on other things and not just what I saw. I tuned in closely to what I was hearing as well. I also focused on what I could feel, like the breeze that was coming in from the water. The smell of the crisp winter air. These are things that a picture cannot capture, and by focusing on the other senses you can better understand the detail that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.