DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes "The schedule doesn't work. We're going to miss half the sessions because of a competing training commitment, and I'm not confident we'll get the full benefit of the instruction. What kind of program is this?!?!" That email landed in my inbox earlier this fall. On Wednesday, I was drawing for a room of Navy nuclear engineers working through funding, hiring, workflows, and core values on some very specialized programs. It's hard work, and there's a lot riding on...
14 days ago • 2 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes About 13 years ago, I worked with a Navy chief at Cyber Command. Every time you asked him how he was doing, he gave the same, great answer. "Best. Day. Ever." Every single time. Usually, when you hear somebody say the same thing over and over, it gets old. For some reason, this never did. The way he delivered it, the look on his face, the tone, the cadence. It always made me smile. Cyber Command was a hard assignment. People were worked to the bone. Do I think he...
21 days ago • 3 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes You'd think people would look at a finished illustrated board and have some kind of binary response to it. Either they liked it, or they didn't. After all, it's just a board of drawings and illustrations with words there too for context. You’d think they’d all, to a person, say things like, "Thanks, Wade! We're going to take this back to the team and action on the idea. We're going to post this somewhere!" Or just, "Thanks, Wade," and that's it. But no. It...
29 days ago • 3 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes Let me take you back a couple of weeks. I was in a bad mood. Sulky, annoyed, sitting there thinking I didn't really know what this fall was going to look like. What came out of that mood was the newsletter I sent about the four miles of art I've drawn over the years, and the 500 more I'd go for down the road. The 500 was mostly because it made for a catchy subject line. Let's credit The Proclaimers for that one. But the loosely estimated mile number aside, the...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes Back in college, I ended up in a dance performance. Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t call myself a dancer - outside of the occasional wedding reception. At the time, I was a theater major and also pushing 220 lbs. Let’s just say I wasn’t getting parts because of my dance moves. But an open call sheet went out to the drama department for non-dancers (check) who could count and move to music (mostly a check), so I signed up. It was a workshop piece, a line of...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes The marker bag got packed up at the end of a multi-day conference last week. I capped the pens and rolled up the sheets. Headed for the car. And I really should have felt super satisfied. Everything had turned out great. But then there’s this other feeling… One thing about this kind of work, and maybe your kind of work too, is that it can somehow feel like it is never quite enough. You come off a big gig, a longer job, and instead of high-fives all around, the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes For almost eighteen years I walked a certain kind of hall. The halls of the intelligence world. Halls of contracts and labor categories, of the space between the Agency and the Command. Tough places to create in. The military and intelligence communities are not exactly known for their artistic leanings, which might be the understatement of the century. I still took my markers out plenty back then. I brought art into that world everywhere I could. But I...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes Newsflash: I am not a firefighter. Surprised? It’s true. I am not an expert in fire prevention. I have never fought a wildfire in my life. I wanted to get all of that out of the way up front, so the next part lands a little harder. A few weeks ago I stood up in front of a room full of firefighters, utility crews, and wildfire experts, and summarized nine hours of everything they had covered. Why some poles burn and some do not. What it costs to send one person...
2 months ago • 2 min read
DRAW WHAT MATTERS Wade Forbes I had the weirdest feeling last week. I was drawing at a wildfire prevention conference, Piedmont Wildfire-Energy Workshop. For hours I stood at my board while one expert after another laid out how bad the situation is getting. Single fires that split into 20+ all at once. Forests drying out and droughts running longer every year. $20,000 just to outfit a firefighter to bravely run into harm’s way. Homes built with so much plastic now that firefighters breathe...
2 months ago • 2 min read