Drawing is not an Art, it is a Thought!
- Dustin Rimmey
- 19 hours ago
- 5 min read
I did not expect to have my entire worldview surrounding art and creativity blown away at ISTE, but here we are.
Manuel Herrera said something I wish I had heard as I was limping through all of my theatrical design classes in college (I was the rare speech/theater ed person who was in the program for the speech part). Manny said:
STOP THINKING ABOUT DRAWING AS AN ARTISTIC PROCESS. IT IS A THINKING PROCESS.
I wrote it in all caps in my notes because it deserved all caps. I am writing it in all caps here because it still does.
This was a session I was excited for, but did not know I would be transformed the most by it from all of my experiences of the week. Not because it introduced a new tool or announced a new feature or previewed something coming in a future update. But because Manuel Herrera and Joe Merrill walked into a room and dismantled something I had assumed for more than 30 years: that drawing is for people who can draw.
It is not. Drawing is for everyone who thinks. Which is everyone.
The Speakers
Manuel Herrera is an international speaker, an accomplished illustrator, and a veteran educator with over twenty years of experience leading workshops across the globe at conferences including SXSWEdu, ISTE, TCEA, FETC, and the International Sketchnote Camp. He is a Canva Learning Consultant, a Google Innovator, and a Learning and Development Specialist for Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in sketchnoting, visual thinking, and design thinking, and he has spent two decades making the argument that visual thinking is not a skill reserved for artists. It is a cognitive tool available to anyone willing to pick up a pen.
Joe Merrill is one half of TheMerrillsEDU, a classroom teacher with fifteen years of experience, co-author of the InterACTIVE Class series alongside his wife Kristin, and a national presenter passionate about helping educators create learning that actually sticks. Together, Joe and Kristin have built their careers around a single belief: students learn best when they create, collaborate, and connect. Their latest book, Creativity in a World of AI, is the most current expression of that belief, and Joe's presence in this session was the live demonstration of it.
Two people who believe deeply that creativity is not a talent. It is a practice. And they put that belief in front of a room at ISTE and dared everyone in it to pick up a pen.
Make Four Scribbles
The session started with a simple instruction: make four scribbles.
Not four drawings. Not four sketches. Four scribbles: messy, loose, no plan required. And then: turn them into birds. Think about what all birds have in common. Put those elements on your scribble in a defined squiggle.
The point was not to make beautiful birds. The point was to demonstrate, immediately, that drawing is not about artistic skill. It is about identifying what makes something recognizable. What are the essential elements? What does the thing actually need to read as the thing it is?
That is not an art question. That is a thinking question. It is the same question a historian asks when they distill a complex event into its essential causes. The same question a scientist asks when they categorize a phenomenon by its defining characteristics. The same question a writer asks when they choose which details to include and which to leave out.
Manuel's framework for the session was built around two modes of drawing, and the distinction between them is where the real pedagogy lives.
The first mode is concrete drawing: easy-to-draw concrete things using simple shapes. A city. A person. A tree. A mountain. Things that exist in the physical world and can be rendered with basic geometric forms: squares, circles, lines, triangles, clouds. You do not need to be an artist to draw a recognizable city with a square and two triangles. You need to know what makes a city recognizable.
The second mode is abstract drawing: representing feelings, thoughts, and emotions.
This is where Invisible Things comes in.
Taking it to the Next Level!
Invisible Things by Andy J. Pizza and Sophie Miller is a New York Times bestselling picture book about giving visual form to the things that are not visible. What does hope look like? What shape is gratitude? If you could see an itch, what would it look like?
The book is playful and wacky and deeply serious at the same time; it is essentially asking readers to develop a visual vocabulary for their own interior experience. And it maps directly onto Manuel's abstract drawing framework in a way that is immediately transferable to any classroom.
How do you represent something invisible through drawing? Manuel's had the audience focus on these questions:
What is the weight of this thing? Is it heavy, light, or bouncy? A heavy idea gets drawn differently than a light one.
What is the shape of this thing? Is it spiky and sharp, soft and blobby, hard and boxy, or scribbled and tangled? An anxious thought looks different from a confident one; the act of deciding which shape it is requires us to actually think about what anxiety feels like, which is a more sophisticated cognitive task than filling in a definition on a vocabulary sheet.
That combination, concrete drawing for visible things, abstract drawing for invisible ones, gives students a visual thinking toolkit that works across every subject area. A social studies student drawing the weight and shape of colonialism. A science student drawing the shape of entropy. An ELA student drawing what the mood of a poem feels like in their hand.
Bringing Adobe and Canva Together
The app-smashing element of the session, the part that made the audience audibly react, was what happened after the drawing.
We took the idea of invisible things, took our drawings (either on paper or in Canva), and used Adobe to bring them to life. Mine was a paper-to-Adobe transition because I didn't have a mouse with me that morning.
After finishing our drawings, using Manny's instructions, Joe walked us through a very simple addition of the mouth animation from Adobe to give our emotions voices of their own.
I decided to bring imposter syndrome to life. But, instead of seeing the imposter speak, they are surrounded by experts (the recording was Joe's audio as he walked about the room).
The Line I Keep Coming Back To
True learning sticks. We're more than a week post-session as I'm writing and editing this, and I have that same line Manny shared with us stuck in my head.
Stop thinking about drawing as an artistic process. It is a thinking process.
I have been a Social Sciences teacher for nearly twenty years. I have never been a confident drawer. I have never thought of myself as someone who uses visual thinking as a pedagogical tool.
I left that session planning to change both of those things.
Find Joe and Manny:
Joe Merrill — @themerrilsedu on X and Instagram
TheMerrillsEDU website: https://www.themerrillsedu.com The InterACTIVE Class and Creativity in a World of AI: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0842TPNNY
Manuel Herrera — @manuelherrera33 on X and Instagram
Manuel's illustration work: https://www.manueldraws.com
Invisible Things by Andy J. Pizza and Sophie Miller: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Things-Andy-J-Pizza/dp/1797215205
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