My best thing today in sketchnotes
When Sacha Chua created her awesome sketchnotes I became fascinated with this way of visualizing understanding, and when later Asher Wolf wrote daily “Tell me your best thing today” (e.g. 2020-09-20) I started to sketch the best event from yesterday every morning.
Here you find many of the later sketches. They help me to remember what I enjoyed. To look at the past with a smile. I hope you like this glimpse into good memories.
I first tried this in the first summer vacation during Corona (2020). After that great experience I practiced it more and more consistently.
If this gets you to dare sketching or skribbling what you enjoyed the most, and if that helps you keep more happy memories, then my sketches make the world a slightly better place. I hope you have fun here!
My best thing today sketches inspired Sacha Chua, whose sketchnotes inspired me, to start drawing Daily moments with her kid! ✨
The most recently scanned sheet comes first, order inside the sheet is from top to bottom and left to right, except where it is not :-).
2025-04
2025-03
2025-02
2025-01
2024-12b
2024-12
2024-11
2024-10
2024-09
2024-08
2024-07
2024-06
2024-05
2024-04
2024-03
2024-02
2024-01
2023-12
2023-11b
2023-11
2023-10
2023-09
2023-08
2023-07
2023-06
2023-05
2023-03
2023-02
2023-01
2022-12
2022-11c
2022-11b
2022-11a
2022-10
2022-09
2022-08
Materials
In the drawings from 2023-01 to 2024-01 (inclusive) I mostly used a
1.5 Pitt Artist Pen bullet nib, Black 199*** (Faber Castell). I
started with brush pens, but found more and more that this plain 1.5
pen supports my drawing style even though it wasn’t my first choice.
Since 2024-02 I mostly used a fude nib medium, Black 199*** which
seems a good fit for the smaller scales I use and has more predictable
thickness than the 1.5 bullet nib. I do not yet know whether I’ll
stick to it.
Highlights are mostly with Pitt Artist Pen Brushes (B): Cold Grey III
232***, Orange Glaze 113*** (sun orange), Chrome Yellow 109***
(earth yellow), Cobalt turquoise 154***, and May Green 170*** (grass
green).
Details about choosing the colors (with a focus on colorblindness, being able to sketch different kinds of scenes with a small number of colors, and lightfastness) are written in Farb-Ersatz (in German).
The *** or ** are a measure of lightresistance of the colors.
*** is document-proof quality.
Drawn in an A6 notebook.
But to take a decision about materials to use, don’t only take this single experience. There are comparisons of many different pens online. For example
- fine liner pen shootout (missing the Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens) and
- Tool Duel: Faber-Castell VS. Sakura Pigma Pens (which adds the comparison between Faber-Castell PITT and Sakura Pigma) — thanks to this article and then direct testing in the store I nowadays have a Sakura 005 in addition to my Faber-Castell PITT pens and they go well together. Though I found out afterwards that nowadays there is also the PITT fineliner XXS which from my testing performs exactly like the Sakura 005, so the comparison might be a bit outdated. But Sakura nowadays has the Micron 003, so the finer fineliner is likely still the one by Sakura.
- The only one as fine as the finest Sakura (that I know) is the refillable rOtring isograph I used in school to solve math homework in margin notes. I got very lucky that my teacher accepted that. By their description, it is even finer than the Sakura 003 (0.1mm vs. 0.15mm).
(this is just my personal take. I don’t get any pay or similar for it.)
As an aside: I postprocess the scans with Gimp (color curves) and
shrink the PNGs to half their size with pngquant --speed=1.