When Wilson James approached me to bring their airport assistance service to life, the brief was clear: show the experience from booking to boarding, and highlight the care and personalisation that underpin every stage. Together, we mapped out the key moments of the journey and the essential values they wanted to convey. Above all, the human touch behind the service.

In documentary work, listening is everything.

You can’t script real life. You can prepare, research and ask questions - but ultimately your job is to tune in, observe and notice what’s actually unfolding.

That means listening beyond the obvious.

Noticing pauses. Contradictions. Emotions. The moments that reveal what someone really means rather than simply what they say.

That skill translates directly into my work creating animated explainers, live illustration and visual storytelling.

This project highlights how live illustration can support environmental organisations, government bodies and NGOs in particular.

When you’re working on:

• river restoration

• climate or environmental programmes

• cross-sector collaboration

• impact measurement and reporting

…visual facilitation can offer a different way to explore and communicate ideas.

You can have a brilliant strategy, a meaningful project, or powerful insights…
…but if your audience doesn’t get it quickly, it gets lost.

That’s a common challenge for organisations sharing:

• Strategy documents

• Stakeholder insights

• Impact reports

• Change initiatives

The information is there. The intention is there.
But the message doesn’t always land.

During your event, whether it’s a conference, workshop, or team strategy session, I listen deeply, process the discussion, and draw as it unfolds. The illustrations are designed to be completed by the time your event wraps up - no extra editing or studio work required and you leave the session with a complete, authentic visual record.

Whether your event is about tech, healthcare, education or anything in between, live illustration can help bring your content to life - making even the most complex topics engaging, memorable and accessible.

Do you need your audience to ‘get it’ quickly? Whether you’re presenting a strategy, sharing impact or engaging stakeholders, an animated infographic can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Traditional end-of-year reports can be dense and difficult to digest. By contrast, an animated timeline can offer a visual summary of progress, challenges, and growth - something that can be shared easily with stakeholders, presented at events, and used to spark further conversation.

Infographics are a bridge between information and understanding. For Lucy, they have become tools to articulate her expertise, attract the right clients and communicate her work with confidence.

We’ve all sat through those online meetings and conferences that blur into one with a sea of faces. But it doesn’t have to be that way! You can let live illustration do the heavy lifting, making keynotes and presentations more impactful, engaging and memorable.

As a learning disability advocate, and with lived experience as a sibling to a sister with profound and multiple learning disabilities, I drew on this background to interpret the stories into visuals that were both empathetic and authentic.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is this: "How much does live illustration and graphic recording cost?" The honest answer? It depends. Let me help you understand what goes into pricing and why this service offers so much more than just a drawing.

This is what motivated me to start Esther Sketches. To have better conversations, make sure everyone is on the same page and turn ideas into action.

I’ve seen how visual notes can make a real difference and are essential for any successful strategy session. 

This felt so up my street! I love helping organisations with audience and participant consultation especially in the arts and cultural sector. 

I graphic facilitated the sessions, capturing conversations, themes and learning in real time. The workshops offered a rare and powerful opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of how people with learning disabilities experience discrimination. 

I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. Each live illustration project is tailored to the room, the audience, and the goals of the event.

Sometimes that means quietly capturing the flow of a dialogue-rich workshop. Other times, it’s holding space for complex conversations and surfacing what’s not being said. In every case, the goal is the same: to make thinking visible.

they were looking for a live event illustrator to visually capture a fast-paced, three-day academic conference. We explored whether a digital, screen-based approach or a large-scale graphic wall would be appropriate and settled on the 3 meter wall. Martin was driven by a hunger to see an artist’s pen at work in an increasingly AI-led and automated world. Refreshing! For him and his delegates, witnessing the human hand behind the visuals was essential.

Using live illustration and visual facilitation tools, we made thinking visible and surfaced perspectives that might otherwise go unheard.

I distilled complex conversations into a clear, engaging illustration, transforming spoken ideas into a visual summary that was easy to reference and share.

As a visual scribe for events, my role was to capture key insights, emotional highlights and emerging solutions in real time, turning fast-moving discussions into clear, accessible visual summaries.