Let’s start this advent calendar with Mauro. let’s follow the order of my discovery. Mauro Toselli is also a keystone of the Sketchnoting community, so he is well placed in first position. I notice Mauro appear in my Twitter feed around 2015. Someone retweeted his work. He was sharing pictures of a long walk in the mountains somewhere in the North of Italy. He was sharing picture of a solitary walk. At that time I was not interested in Sketchnotes but drawings and walks yes. I was also following the travels of @snowded for the same reasons. I was hiking in the mountains through their eyes. He was also sharing sketches of recipes with pasta. That’s our second shared interest. And he’s in IT, I’m too. I followed him, always on Twitter, for his 100 days challenge #The100DayProject. I started to be seriously interested. https://twitter.com/xLontrax/status/698773278601695232 He made a book from this work. I bought it at once. It was the first book that got me back into drawing. https://www.flickr.com/photos/xlontrax/sets/72157667931161922/ For me, the value of the book is to deconstruct the approach of the doodler.

• Find simple shapes inside a complex shape.
• Start by outlining them.
• Finalize the complex shape

Everyone is doing that including svg artists. It’s only a year later, in 2016, that I started to get interested in Sketchnoting as a mean to think, learn and communicate visually. His site: https://www.maurotoselli.com/ He’s on Twitter at @xLontrax This is his flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/xlontrax/ I met Mauro twice: During the first International Sketchnote Camp in Berlin in 2017, 3 months ago in Lisbon. He shared his latest thinking on his “Theory of Sketchnote”. Watch him Mauro is also a tinkerer. He makes his books binding himself and document the process. I share this passion too. https://twitter.com/xLontrax/status/1066648874880765952 He started like this an initiative of a book traveling all around the world to collect a page from each sketchnoter of the sketchnote army. https://twitter.com/xLontrax/status/1043167421262114816 The book is in Poland now: https://twitter.com/AniaStaskiewicz/status/1060620104717819904 Nice tweet I used for my drawing. https://twitter.com/LuisGonzagacom/status/1043440262050193410 Here are my first tentatives. I’m not very good to draw a portrait. I’m going to suck for 23 days and hopefully the last ones will suck less.   PS1: For this adventure of the advent calendar, I had to choose an order. Who is the most important? It’s not a community of prominent show-off members. People are important for me because they are nice humans and bring me something. I met them in my journey toward using my brain, pen and paper. The more natural was to follow the order in which I encountered them. PS2: The idea of this challenge came from a tweet from Sarah Drasner. @Sarah_edo. She is in my javascript list, a very different world but connected since she gave this week, 2 days of workshop on design and vector graphic animation. Nothing is totally disconnected when we are constant learners. https://twitter.com/sarah\_edo/status/1068500649233563649 PS3: Seems Advent starts really tomorrow, means in 15 minutes. That’s cool, as a serial procrastinator I was late.