How I Handwrite My Illustrated Stories

A few months back, I posted on Instagram a short video of myself hand-writing something on my iPad, and someone commented, “You mean you actually write that stuff out by hand?” And I realized, I’ve never really explained how I make these handwritten and illustrated stories, so I thought I’d take a minute to do that in this video. (OK, it’s actually 3 minutes and 29 seconds)

And of course, here’s a handwritten + illustrated version of the above video:

Then I consider how I best think I can present it. Sometimes it's a single image I draw. [Illustration “What do you call these things?” ] Sometimes it's an entire YouTube video. [SCREENSHOT OF YouTube Video “The Seven Summits of My Neighborhood”] Sometimes it's a written piece with some images and illustrations, [SCREENSHOT OF Outside Online story “The Ultra-Trail Cape Town 100K Is Not for the Faint of Heart”] and occasionally, it's an entirely handwritten piece with illustrations that I draw. [SCREENSHOT OF Outside Online story “I Did A Plank Every Day For 120 Days. Here's What Happened.”] But it is a lot of work compared to typing something. I type somewhere between 60 and 75 words per minute, and when I hand write something, it's much, much slower than that. [Photo of Brendan Leonard drawing] I use an iPad app called Procreate when I write and draw, and I really only use one brush, which is a modified gel pen I have saved to look exactly how I want it to look. Side note: Procreate is an amazing app and I think real artists do some really amazing stuff with it. I would guess I use maybe 1% of the capability of the app in what I do. In order for my handwriting to be readable, I have to constantly zoom in, write really big letters, zoom back out, and read it, and then scroll across the canvas. I write in all capital letters, which is something I've always done. It's just easier for me to write legibly that way. To break up the text in a story so it's not just one big block of handwriting, I will draw charts or illustrations or sometimes take a photo and just draw a little frame around it. I never had any formal graphic design training aside from learning how to design and print newspaper pages in the early 2000s, which gave me an idea of how to manipulate words and images to make the most of the space I had. [PHOTOS OF OLD NEWSPAPER PAGES] A big chunk of my following is on Instagram, so sometimes I will engineer these stories so that they fit on 10 Instagram portrait-sized slides. [SCREENSHOT OF INSTAGRAM CAROUSEL] You hope to grab people's attention with the first one, and hopefully, they scroll through the next nine slides and get the entire story. That can be a challenge, but I think it also helps give me a constraint on how long a story should be, and that way I can use it in my email newsletter, on my website, on my column for outside online, on Instagram and Threads.