The Pencil Pirates course was absolutely exquisite! The instructor (Laura) is absolutely amazing in every way. I learned so much that was 100% practical. I now have a method for creating useful visuals very easily. Most valuable was learning how to think better (and more deeply) about how to best use visuals to explain and persuade. I would recommend this course to everyone, especially educators and presenters. Lawyers (like me) also can benefit from learning to think visually and then create simple drawings to explain their thought process.

The last time I attempted to draw must have been in elementary school, it wasn't even this millennium. Then I met Laura and the Pencil Pirates community, and making marks with meaning has become a daily activity that not only I enjoy deeply, but is growing engagement with my online content.

I absolutely loved Pencil Pirates!! Such a well designed course. The concepts helped with developing the skill of visual communications. The lessons were engaging. The activities were fun and challenging. It was great to see the progression of everyone's work. Biggest takeaway was making marks with meaning!! Makes drawing so much more enjoyable Improve: A great way to learn online is giving feedback to others. I'd recommend setting the expectation at the beginning to find X number of other student's work to critique with some sort of criteria. Something like which of the following criteria was met well and which could be improved? By looking for it in other people's work it would help me develop it for mine. It would also be interesting to see how others would critique mine. This might be too much of an undertaking, but I think it might help deepen learning the concepts

It was a fantastic learning experience. My takeaway was being able to create an atomic visual within 15 minutes. One thing to improve would be have more structured themes in the week 2/3 to help build confidence on subjects.

This is my first online cohort and it was amazing! The community is very helpful, patient, and communicative. Pencil Pirates has gotten me to think differently, taught me how to publish with confidence (even when I don’t feel it), and build a better habit with creating.

Pencil Pirates opened a new creative outlet in my life. Before learning about atomic visuals from Laura, I'd never sketched before at all. Her teaching was so accessible—it made it impossible to not jump in and try my hand at them. Plus, Laura has an answer for every excuse out there about why people think they can't draw or visualize their ideas—so I couldn't hide behind my fears about it! My early blocks were thinking I had to draw everything freehand (in other words, be a talented artist already) and perfectionism. Laura showed me I didn't need to arrive with a mountain of talent already underneath me. She shared simple strategies for drawing new things, like using reference images. If I'm still stuck after that, I can follow her advice to look for a simpler way to represent my idea, with fewer lines and less complexity. As she teaches in the course, there's always a way within your current skills to visualize anything. And as for perfectionism, I carry her mantra with me every time I sit down to draw: "Make marks with meaning." There's a time to make a visual a work of art, and a time to prioritize communicating an idea. Both are valid, but the latter helps me get unstuck and share my visuals with others, both publicly and with fellow participants. And the participants—the Pencil Pirates community—are golden. There are people from all walks of life in the course. Their varied backgrounds, ideas, styles, and supportive encouragement make the journey endlessly inspirational. I learned as much from them as I did from Laura. After 2 cohorts, I've grown enough to be able to make a visual like the one I attached here. Now I want to improve my skills at making quicker, simpler visuals, too. I'll be back for Cohort 3 to practice this—and to learn even more from Laura and the new Pirates in the community.