Josh and I took a beekeeping class in Statesboro last weekend! Not only was it super interesting, but I also got to spend the morning creating hand drawn notes, which my buddy Kim says will help what you’re learning to stick in your head better. I can’t remember the book she read about it, but if she reminds me I’ll share the title with you.

I wasn’t planning on doodling my notes from the start – but before class got rolling, I drew this in my notebook:

A photo posted by Hearts and Laserbeams (@hrtsnlaserbeams) on Mar 5, 2016 at 5:21am PST

At that point, Josh jokingly told me he wanted all of my notes to look like that.

So I ran with it!

There’s some cute stuff in here – it was really fun to sit and draw super fast while I was learning. No time to stop and edit and fine tune and perfect any one illustration piece. Just go go go, draw as fast as possible, and end up with close to 30 pages of hand drawn notes chock full of tips about beekeeping and cute ideas for future artwork!

As I get into my hand drawn notes, you’ll see two things repeated over and over. Instead of using the word be anywhere, I changed it to bee. And also, if I had to write but, it became butt.

Because I’m twelve.

The queen marking tool we heard about in beekeeping class was kind of intriguing. You basically have this little clear plastic cylinder with a soft plunger in it and a screen on the end… Get the queen in there and hold her in place with the plunger while you mark her with a marker through the mesh.

I don’t go out to our hives often, but the queen is super important to your hive’s health. If there’s no queen, your hive is in trouble – so being able to see her easily while you’re looking inside the hive is super helpful!

I think outside of bees, the one thing that shows up in my hand drawn notes the most is smokers.

So the biggest questions we had going into beekeeping class centered around splits, because Josh has been considering splitting our monster beehives. You can tell how fast and furiously I was writing my notes when we got to that part of the lecture because all drawing stopped completely for a little while.

Hands are tough to draw, there I said it.

But take two came out cuter than the top right corner.

I really, really like the idea of winter bees all bundled up in scarves and hats.

True story, “das vadanya” is the only Russian phrase I know.

What does it mean? Someone go google it for me!

That “bee kind” sketch is gonna show up again as a more finalized piece. Promise.

Have you tried hand drawn notes?

I do feel like it helped what we were talking about sink in more, and as an illustrator it was super fun to do!