Up: [[Drawing]] Created: 2025-12-20 Updated: 2026-01-02 Note: Posted in LYT Circle community. A dozen years ago, I took a multi-day course in graphic facilitation with The Grove Consultants.  As beginners, the dozen of us in the class learned the basics of graphic recording. It’s sketch noting but in a group where you’re the one visually recording everything that everyone has said. It’s not easy. You have to be able to actively listen, translate to image, and draw. And you can’t be selective about what you record. You have to capture everything. As a result, speed matters so we spent a lot of time in the course learning little tips like holding all markers between the fingers of our non-dominant hand, caps off, tips pointing up. With time and practice, the recording gets combined with true facilitating where the visuals you make work at the deeper levels of metaphor to draw out and portray group processes. I ended up retiring a year after taking the course so I didn’t progress beyond beginner level. But when I heard about the Visual Gong and Meera’s assertion that the bar of entry was the ability to pick up a pencil and make a mark, I remembered that one of the things we focused on in The Grove training was learning how to draw people fast! I thought it might be of some use to anyone who feels unhappy with their stick figure drawing ability. The Grove teaches what they call “seed shapes” — simple graphics that can be elaborated on without changing the underlying pattern. It’s just about essential features so that the image is recognizable, nothing more.  Grove is particularly known for their Star People. Arms and legs are like points on a five point star, as you see in the first row of the image. By playing around with the length and shape of the arms and legs, as well as head size, you’ll eventually get to a little person that you love to draw, and that can do way more than act like a scarecrow. ![[Stick Figure People.webp]]