Ways to Use Written Notes

What happens when you add words to your sketch?

Jun 19, 2025

There are a lot of ways to pep up a sketchbook drawing with written notes. Here are four of my favorites:

1. Wall of Talk

If you want to capture the flavor of someone talking, but the specific wording doesn’t matter, you can fill the space behind the portrait with fragmentary line.

2. Information Dump

Research whatever you’re sketching, and provide detailed call-out annotations. Both you and the viewer will learn a lot.

3. Six-Word Story

In just six carefully-chosen words, you can introduce characters and add the hint of backstory, foreshadowing, surprise, mystery, revelation, or resolution. The picture can give context to your story or expand it in a new direction.

4. Separate Story

If the story idea is longer, you don’t have to write it all on the same page. Here’s what I dreamed up for this one:

The old house stood beside the railroad tracks. A satellite dish turned its ear to the dead sky. Some of the windows were covered over with clapboards, like blind eyes. A freight train rumbled by, screeching and grinding.

A man came out of the house. He lifted a TV into the back of the pickup. Then he loaded in a chair and a table. He stretched a black plastic tarpaulin over the load and tied it down, jerking the rope and muttering. The black tarp shimmered in the March sunlight.

A woman leaned her head out of the door. “Get lost,” she yelled. “I don’t care if I never see you again.” The door slammed. A turkey vulture circled overhead.

I sat on the sidewalk across the street, painting quietly. Cigarette butts were scattered beside my feet.

The man got into the truck and started the engine. The train passed and the crossing gates lifted. The truck roared across the tracks.

A half hour later the woman came out, wiping her eyes with her sweatshirt sleeves. She walked by, pushing a baby carriage, slowing down a little to see what I was doing.
(Note--I did this painting on location, and parts of the story happened--the action of the truck and the train and the vulture, but the human story was imaginary. Sometimes I can't stop my mind from overlaying a story onto a scene, and I'm attracted to sketching in bleak neighborhoods because of the strange glimpses of human existence I encounter there.)

It's fun to surround a drawing with random words pulled out of the air. Sometimes weird sparks fly between the notes and the sketch because of the way our brains make associations.