Drawing Out Your Genius
A Drawing Workshop with Lisa Rothstein
Abstract
Bring more humanity, story, and feeling into your drawings.
Whether you're a facilitator, consultant, coach, or visual thinker, this hands-on workshop will help you move beyond stick figures and charts to create drawings that truly connect. Led by New Yorker cartoonist, writer, and visual facilitator Lisa Rothstein, you'll learn simple, expressive techniques to make your visual work come alive with emotion.
What you'll learn
- Draw faces that express real emotion: joy, frustration, surprise, pride, and more
- Add simple body language and gestures that tell a story
- Capture the emotional content of what people are saying, not just the words
- Choose when and where to bring emotion into your visual notes or illustrations
- Replace lifeless stick figures with quick, expressive characters anyone can draw
- Also, we'll practice drawing animals!
Why it matters
Emotional expression brings humanity to your visuals. When you show people feeling something — not just doing something — your audience instantly connects. A character straining under the weight of too many tasks says more than a to-do list ever could. A joyful customer sketch communicates success faster than twenty PowerPoint slides.
Speaker Bio
Lisa Rothstein
Business storyteller and New Yorker cartoonist, Lisa is a former Madison Avenue creative strategist for global brands like IBM and Hanes. A Brown University Semiotics grad and certified Design Sprint/Workshopper Master and Virtual Facilitator, she helps organizations communicate, collaborate, and get buy‑in with visual thinking. Clients include Bayer, RobRoy Industries, and Consumer Reports.
Watch the Session
Session Summary
This presentation provided a deep dive into the use of simple cartooning and human expression as powerful tools within visual thinking. Lisa, leveraging her background in advertising and a degree in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), frames her core mission as making "complicated things simple and boring things interesting."
Key Idea: Emotional Connection Through Character
Lisa's primary insight is that including people—even quick, simple doodles—in visual notes, diagrams, and business communications instantly creates an emotional connection with the viewer. This is crucial because it makes ideas relatable and ensures the audience feels "seen." This practice is especially valuable in virtual or remote settings, where non-verbal cues and emotional context are often lost.
Her approach to visual thinking is categorized into three "Cs": Characters (the focus of the session), Concepts (icons and symbols), and Contexts (graphs, diagrams, and metaphors). Lisa argues that a robust visual vocabulary requires having go-to elements in each of these three areas.
The Power of Simple Lines: Inspirations and The "Magic"
The foundation of Lisa's method lies in simplifying expressions to their absolute core. She cites her major influences:
- Charles Schulz (Peanuts): She describes studying how Schulz conveyed complex, distinct emotions like anxiety, resignation, and joy with just a few minimal lines, proving that simplicity does not equate to a lack of depth.
- James Thurber (The New Yorker): Thurber's work exemplifies the use of slight variations in eye shape and body language to communicate feelings like fear, worry, or annoyance.
Lisa's key insight is a foundational one for all visual thinkers: "The worse it looks, the better it works." Drawing well is not the goal; communicating clearly is. An overly polished drawing can distract the viewer by making them compliment the art rather than engage with the idea.
The Drawing Methodology: Faces and Bodies
1. The Magic of Two Lines (Faces): Starting with a series of identical blank faces (simple ovals, two dots for eyes, a 'U' for the nose), Lisa showed that changing just the eyebrows and the mouth can instantly transform an emotion:
- Happy Face + Arched Brows (Sad Eyebrows): Creates a nuanced feeling of wistfulness, nervousness, or sentimental anxiety.
- Happy Face + Downward V-Shaped Brows (Angry Eyebrows): Creates a feeling of wickedness or malice.
- Unhappy Face + Sad Eyebrows: Creates deep sadness and struggle.
- Unhappy Face + Angry Eyebrows: Creates anger, determination, or indignation.
The overall takeaway is that by mastering these minimal adjustments, one can essentially create their own "emojis" and apply them to any character.
2. The Alternative to Stick Figures: Lisa critiques the use of stick figures as "dehumanizing," despite their perceived ease. She proposes two simple, more expressive alternatives for body language:
- The Star Person: Starting with a five-point star and adding a head immediately creates a dynamic figure. The points can be adjusted to show action (jumping), interaction (high-fiving), or posture (depressed).
- Keyhole Ken: Starting with the shape of an old-fashioned keyhole, closing the top, and adding limbs creates a dimensional body that can be easily "dressed up" as a chef or a professional, and even turned sideways to form animals like dogs and cats.
The SKETCH Framework and Practical Application
Lisa briefly outlined the SKETCH mnemonic from her book as a wider framework for applying visual thinking: Simplify (The 3 Cs), Kickstart (innovation), Engage (buy-in), Transform (meetings), Capture (sketch-noting), and Harmonize (team alignment).
In the professional realm, she noted that her preferred digital tool is Procreate (iPad), specifically praising the Time-Lapse Replay feature. This tool automatically records the drawing process, allowing the creator to export a one-minute fast-motion video of an hour-long session, which is highly effective for client recaps, pitch decks, and internal communication.
Finally, when addressing the challenge of drawing abstract emotions (e.g., reciprocity), Lisa advises turning to symbolic representation (e.g., two hands exchanging gifts) and, if necessary, using words to clarify the meaning, as simple abstract icons can otherwise be misinterpreted (e.g., Reciprocity looking like Recycling).