Visual Courage Part 1: The Blank Page
The Art of Applied Visual Thinking
The official newsletter of
Applied Visual Thinking SUPERHEROES.
Vol. 7 No. 6 March 20, 2026
VISUAL COURAGE, PART 1: Facing the Blank Page
The blank page is terrifying. Even for seasoned visual thinkers, writers, designers and creators of anything new and reimagined. To be honest, I experienced a bit of blank page syndrome when I sat down to write this newsletter.
I know you "get" this. Even you SUPERHEROES who have done the work of building your visual thinking discipline practice — showing up, growing through discomfort, coming back when things fall apart.
NOTE: If the idea of a discipline practice sounds unfamiliar or scary to you, check out our "Discipline as Self-Care" series introduced in Vol. 6, No. 23 here and explained in depth in Volume 7, Numbers 1, 2 and 3.
You decide on a direction, lay some track, and yet something keeps the train at a standstill. You sit down, open your sketchbook, uncap your pen and… nothing. The fear, the inner critic, the procrastination bug, something swoops in before the ink even touches the paper.
Superhero Truth: Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's picking up the pen anyway.
That's what this new series is about.
Visual Courage — the four flavors of bravery for visual thinkers. We're starting at the very beginning:
the blank page, and the voice in your head that wants to fill it with doubt instead of drawings.
THE THREE FACES OF BLANK-PAGE FEAR
Before we can conquer something, we have to name it. Blank-page fear tends to show up in three disguises:
- Perfectionism: "It has to be good or it's not worth doing." The pen hovers. The page waits. You are waiting for a guarantee that doesn't exist.
- Comparison: "Mine will never look as good as theirs." You've seen gorgeous sketchnotes on Instagram. Your own work feels scrawly and embarrassing by comparison.
- Relevance: "What's even the point of drawing this?" The inner critic questions the value of the entire exercise before a single mark is made.
You'll know you're facing one of these fears if you feel yourself suddenly motivated to walk the dog, clean out the basement, organize the garage or do pretty much ANYTHING else. That's "productive procrastination." Don't fall for it.
Instead, pause and take a breath. Read through the list of blank-page fears again. Any ring a bell? Most of us cycle through all three — sometimes in the span of sixty seconds.
The good news is that once you can SEE the flavor of fear you're dealing with, you can respond to it directly instead of just freezing.
VISUAL COURAGE IN ACTION:
Facing the blank page
Here's a toolkit of visual courage moves for the blank page. Try one, try all of them, try them in whatever order feels right.
Draw the page. If you can't yet face putting something on the page, draw the page first. Your page could be a sloppy rectangle, a tidy paper icon with a folded corner, or simply the addition of a fancy curlicue at the top to make your page look like a piece of chic stationary. Look at the page shape as a container ready to be filled.
Make a line. If you're like me, sometimes words come easier, sometimes drawings. If you are feeling wordy, invite your line to express a word or phrase, connecting the letters loosely, one to the next. When you are ready to draw, make a line that sorta captures something going on for you right here, right now.
Start ugly on purpose. Now that your hand remembers how to move but before you dig into what you actually want to draw, fill half a page with intentionally bad drawings. Lopsided circles. Wobbly stick figures. A house a five-year-old would be proud of. This tells your inner critic: we're not aiming for beautiful right now. We're warming up. Once your hand is moving and the page is no longer pristine, the pressure evaporates.
Give the inner critic a name and a face.
Sounds silly. Works every time. Sketch the voice in your head as a character — maybe it's a tiny grumpy toad sitting on your shoulder, or a miniature bureaucrat with a clipboard full of objections. When you can SEE the critic as a separate character rather than your own voice, you can negotiate with it instead of obeying it. (Bonus: the act of drawing it is itself a visual thinking victory.)
Borrow a prompt.
Staring at a blank page with no directive is the hardest version of this game. Give yourself a tiny nudge: Draw something you saw this morning. Draw your mood as a weather system. Draw the word "Wednesday." Constraints are the enemy of blank page paralysis. They give you somewhere to start — and starting is everything.
Time-box it.
Set a timer for five minutes.
Tell yourself this: I HAVE to keep drawing for the next five minutes, no matter what. No stopping. The inner critic has a hard time being heard above a timer ticking. And when the timer goes off you have — guaranteed — something on the page.
BLANK-PAGE COURAGE WITH YOUR TEAMS
This isn't just a personal practice challenge. If you're using visual thinking with groups, you know the collective blank-page moment — that silence when you ask a group to sketch something and all twelve people suddenly find their shoelaces fascinating.
Here's how to lead your team through it:
- Go first. Pick up the marker and make a mark — any mark — before you invite them. When the leader draws first and makes it imperfect and alive, the group relaxes just a bit.
- Give them the starter kit. Instead of "draw your idea," say "draw your idea using only three shapes and one word." A constraint is a gift.
- Celebrate the scrawl. When someone shares a rough sketch, respond with genuine curiosity: "Tell me more about this part." Never "That's so good!" — that accidentally raises the bar. Curiosity keeps the door open.
Remember: Your job as a visual thinking leader is to make the room safe for imperfect,
courageous marks.
THIS WEEK'S ACTIVITY: The Courage Warm-Up
Before your next visual thinking session — personal or professional — try this five-step courage warm-up.
- Set your timer for 3 minutes.
- Fill an entire page with intentionally bad drawings. Bad suns, bad faces, bad chairs, bad dogs. Go wild.
- Write the name of your inner critic at the top of the page. Give it a little face.
- Turn the page. Now draw the thing you actually wanted to draw.
- Notice the difference. That feeling? That's visual courage. That's your superpower warming up.
Share your warm-up pages with us — ugly ones welcome, actually ESPECIALLY welcome.
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