Illustrator Katie Chappell has a unique superpower: the ability to condense 90-minute conferences into 90 seconds. A live event illustrator, Chappell tackles Zoom fatigue and boredom by spicing things up: documenting conferences and events in the form of playful, bite-sized illustrations.
Her formula is pretty straight forward: creativity + business logic = live illustration. “My drawings are there so that everybody can understand what’s going on straight away without having to sit through hours of Zoom conferences,” she explains on her website, where she offers her illustration services. “I consider myself a spoon-feeder of boring information, bringing people back from the ledge of ‘OMG NOT ANOTHER ZOOM MEETING’.”
Based in North East England, Chappell has collaborated with brands like Facebook, Google, and Apple, graphically recording their conferences. Having worked before in live events and in-person meet-ups (remember those?), the past year has seen Chappell reinvent herself online.
“In January and February 2020 I was traveling all over the UK and Europe for live illustration,” she recalled in a blog post. “Then the pandemic hit and the UK went into lockdown in March and pretty much all of my live illustration work was canceled overnight.”
While she admits she was panicking at first, once she regrouped, Chappell realized the benefits of illustrating online conferences from home. “It’s the dream,” she writes. “I get to work with exciting clients, attend online events and conferences, and make notes.”
But how does one become a live illustrator? In Chappell’s case, it was “an accidental side-effect” of following what she loved to do. Having graduated with an MA in illustration from Edinburgh College of Art, it was during her studies that she fell in love with reportage illustration. “I LOVED the idea that artists could capture what was going on, while it was happening,” she says. “It seemed like magic.”
After a friend asked her to paint her ceremony as it happened, Chappell found herself getting more and more commissions. The rest was history.
