I start my day with murder. You read that correctly. Oh, not real murder. No, I mean in the literary sense. I love starting my days with John Sandford (and others) mystery novels when I am not reading nonfiction. Investigators chasing down leads. Plot twists. Running around with Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers. Stories that step into another world. Sure, my day includes lots and lots of sketching, but I’ve found one of the best ways to access my own thoughts is to first spend time in...
20 days ago • 2 min read
On Monday, Megan came up to me showing a message on her phone. “Is this your Wade Forbes?” I looked at the screen. A message from Robin, her friend since high school, with a link to a Facebook post. My first thought was, “What did I do now?” You know that feeling when someone asks if you’re you, and you’re not sure if you should admit it? Clicked the link. There it was. A photo of a napkin I’d drawn a few days earlier at JG’s Pub in Deep Creek, Maryland. Posted by the restaurant with a...
27 days ago • 2 min read
Here’s the thing about marine biologists: they love their work more than almost anything else in the world. (What, Wade? Marine biologists? Stick with me…) They can go ocean deep on everything from coral polyp regeneration to deep-sea thermal vent ecosystems (or so I’m told). Their passion? 100% genuine. Knowledge? Expert level. Commitment to conservation? All very real. They KNOW the deep blue sea. But conveying all of that in a warm, welcoming way that an eager 8-year-old or curious adult...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
The sketch took about two hours to draw. Hands holding. Pink ribbon. Quiet sunset. The conversation that created it? That took two hours. And by the end, everyone on the video call was crying, including Megan and me. We’d been hired to design a card for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But what was actually delivered was something else entirely. When the Room Changed The project brief was straightforward: create something meaningful for employees affected by cancer. A card, maybe a poster....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I was on a plane recently when the guy next to me figured out I sketch for a living. “You should build an AI bot to do what you do,” he said, scrolling through my LinkedIn posts. “Train it to draw like you, send it to meetings in your place. You’d be making money while you’re sitting at home.” He was excited about the possibilities. Scale without effort. Automation without limits. Who doesn’t love that? Then, not five minutes later, he leaned over again. I kid you not, he said, “Actually, my...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Our friends Chip and Carol Bleam are chiropractors, and they’ve built their practice around a simple philosophy that most people (and honestly, other doctors) find counterintuitive. When someone comes in with an injury, their first instinct isn’t to immobilize it with braces, casts, or tell you to stay off it for a week. Instead, they apply a combination of precise adjustments along with guided movements to promote healing. They teach grandparents to lift 85-pound kettlebells. Not because...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
I think about failure a lot. But not in the way many of us have experienced that feeling before. Sure, at one point (or even many points) in my life, the idea of failure was through the lens of the typical: work, money, family, creativity, etc. I’m sure you have your own, maybe similar, list. But over the years, and especially through this work, it’s been somewhat plain to see that most of the time when we’re afraid of failure, we’re actually afraid of something else entirely. Something...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Over the last 5 years, I’ve done more than 130 live events in industries like healthcare, defense, agriculture, executive coaching, non-profits, and tech (plus a bunch of others, but we’d be here all day with the list). Each is different, and often amazing. Watched an intelligence community team realize they were telling a story about who they were that hadn’t been true for years. But no one had named it out loud until they saw it sketched. Captured the somewhat unspoken tension between two...
2 months ago • 3 min read
“We’d like to thank the artist on board this flight who gave us all these awesome napkins.” I looked up from my seat, confused for a second. Was the pilot talking about me? In all the years I’ve been drawing on planes, sketching on napkins and cups while cruising 10,000 feet above ground, no one from the crew has ever said anything over the loudspeaker. A smile here, a quiet “Thank you” there, sometimes nothing at all, but never a public acknowledgment that the whole cabin could hear on a...
3 months ago • 3 min read