What Is Graphic Recording?
Graphic recording is the process of listening to a conversation, presentation, sermon, or brainstorming session and turning the most important ideas into words and illustrations in real time. A live illustrator captures key themes, connections, and moments as they emerge, creating a form of visual storytelling that helps everyone see the bigger picture.
Unlike ordinary meeting notes, graphic recording keeps people interested while making complicated ideas easier to understand and remember. After the event, the finished illustrations provide a valuable visual record that can be displayed, shared, and used to guide future decisions.
How It Works
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Before the event: I learn about your goals, agenda, audience, and key themes so I understand what matters most.
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During the event: I listen as the conversation unfolds and transform important ideas into words and illustrations in real time, blending my background as an educator with my love for teaching, storytelling, and live drawing. Your audience doesn’t just hear the information. They experience it.
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After the event: You receive a meaningful visual record that can be displayed, shared, repurposed, and used to guide future conversations and decisions.
Kathy Buskett teaching her signature class, Making Faces: How to Draw Faces Even If You Don’t Know How to Draw.
Why Stories + Images Work
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Keeps your audience engaged and interested
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Makes complex ideas easier to understand
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Helps people recognize patterns and connections
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Improves memory and recall
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Encourages participation and conversation
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Creates a visual record you can display and share
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Gets those “phone zombies” off their screens
Benefits of Graphic Recording
Oh No! Not The Phone Zombies!
Research Proves it: Stories Stick
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Research shows that stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone (Stanford Graduate School of Business). And when you add visuals, recall skyrockets even higher.
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That’s because of the Picture-Superiority Effect — people remember images far better than words, since visuals are encoded in the brain twice: once as an image and once as a verbal label.
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Put stories and images together, and you don’t just get attention — you create lasting memories, deeper emotional connections, and messages people carry with them long after the event.
Now be honest. Which image above do you remember? The bar graph?
Or the phone zombies?
A picture is worth a thousand pie charts.
✨ Where Graphic Recording & Storytelling Shine
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Church vision planning and ministry retreats: Reveal patterns, preserve inspired ideas, and help your team see where God may be leading.
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Corporate retreats and strategic planning: Capture conversations, goals, and emerging ideas in real time so teams leave with a clearer shared vision.
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Executive and leadership meetings: Turn complex discussions and strategies into meaningful visual takeaways that support future decisions.
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Conferences, seminars, and keynote presentations: Reinforce important messages through engaging visual storytelling your audience will remember.
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Team-building events and interactive workshops: Encourage creativity, participation, and connection through a shared visual experience.
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Women’s, youth, and motivational events: Bring inspirational messages to life with uplifting illustrations and memorable stories.
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Nonprofit and community planning sessions: Organize different perspectives into a visual record that helps groups recognize common goals and move forward together.
Why Work With Me?
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Nearly 30 years of professional art experience have taken me from Las Vegas to major corporate events across the country. For more than a decade, I drew live at conferences, trade shows, and VIP gatherings for companies and organizations including Samsung and Cirque du Soleil.
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My experience extends far beyond the drawing board. I have served as a CEO, music minister, educator, and speaker, leading classes, workshops, presentations, and group discussions. I understand how to listen carefully, communicate clearly, recognize the heart of a message, and work comfortably with everyone from church leaders to corporate executives.
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When you hire me, you receive more than an artist. You gain an experienced creative partner who understands professional expectations, respects your message and organization, engages your audience, and turns important ideas into visual stories people can understand and remember.
Hi, I’m Kathy Buskett, a professional artist, educator, speaker, and visual storyteller based on the Gulf Coast. I combine nearly 30 years of drawing experience with a background in teaching, ministry, storytelling, and leadership to turn spoken ideas into meaningful artwork in real time.
Whether I’m working with a church, nonprofit, or corporation, I bring curiosity, warmth, and a natural ability to recognize the connections within a larger story.
Graphic Recording for a Church Vision Meeting
Destin Methodist Church in Florida recently hired me to provide graphic recording during a two-day meeting focused on its vision for the next five years. Staff members worked in small groups, prayed, brainstormed, and brought their ideas to me to illustrate.
Some concepts were easy to picture, while others were more abstract. When someone brought me an idea like “faith,” I prayed and waited for an image to come to mind. I represented it with the shield of faith.
At the beginning of the meeting, Michele, the facilitator, gave me the church’s motto:
Worship Passionately.
Love Extravagantly.
Witness Boldly.
Grow Intentionally.
I immediately pictured a cross dividing the page into four sections. Each phrase became its own illustration, joined together by the cross at the center.
As I finished each drawing, Michele taped it to the wall. By the end of the first session, the illustrations covered the drum enclosure. By the end of the second night, they covered an entire wall.
Then the real value of graphic recording became clear. A pattern emerged across both the conversations and the artwork. Again and again, the staff talked about becoming equipped and then going out into the community, bringing Christ beyond the four walls of the church.
The drawings helped make those connections visible. They preserved the group’s ideas, revealed its shared priorities, and created a visual record the church’s committee could continue using after the meeting ended. Michele told me the illustrations would be invaluable during the next stage of their planning.
That is what visual storytelling can do. It turns many voices and inspired ideas into something a group can see, remember, and carry forward together.
Let's Bring Your Story To Life
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