How I got Started (in 3 Images)

This weird

It all seems such a long time ago now!! Nine years to be precise!

It all started with this doodle … posted on Tumblr. Recently unemployed and trying to figure out what to do next (anything but sales that I’d accidentally fallen into 20 years previously), this illustration just came out one day when I was tinkering with a drawing app (Paper by 53 ) I’d just downloaded on my iPad.. the people on Tumblr seemed to like it. And so did the people at Paper because they featured it in their gallery! So I started doodling some more.

A Visual CV

I knew I wanted to do something CREATIVE in my next role.

So I did a creative CV and started sending it out. This was an initial draft for it.

But how do you convince future employers that you’re creative when all it says on your CV is sales and your design degree is nothing but a footnote in the education bit on the back page?

Short answer is … you don’t. At least in my case I didn’t. Because ultimately the jobs I was applying for didn’t require creativity… I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I got ZERO interviews from my creative CV

Sketchnoting

But something else did happen… as I was posting all this stuff on Twitter I discovered the #todaysdoodle hashtag and a wonderful little community of sketchnoters. So I started sketchnoting and came up with this, lot’s of people liked it, so I did some more…and then people started asking me to create stuff for them, and they wanted to pay me for it.

And so I took my first baby steps into the world of Live Illustration and Visual Storytelling that I now inhabit and, I found my future employer - Me!