Live illustrator for conferences and exhibition stands
At a conference, Rui Charnock draws delegate portraits at a stand: two to three minutes a face, fifty to seventy in a three-hour session, in ink and watercolour. The commercial mechanism is straightforward — the drawing stops people walking past, and the queue buys your sales team a conversation with each of them.
Read the next paragraph before you read anything else on this page, because it is the one that decides whether you should be here at all.
Conference formats, side by side
| Delegate portraits | Graphic recording | |
|---|---|---|
| What is produced | 50–70 individual drawings | One or two large summary boards |
| Who it is for | The delegate | The organiser |
| Where it happens | At a stand | In the session room |
| What it is good at | Stopping footfall, starting conversations | Capturing content |
| Offered here | Yes | No — hire a specialist |
This is not graphic recording
Graphic recording — also sold as scribing, sketchnoting or visual minutes — is real-time visual summarising of talks onto large boards, so that the content of a session ends up as a diagram. It is a genuinely different craft with a different deliverable and different people who are excellent at it. I do not do it.
What I do at a conference is draw the delegates. If what you need is the keynote turned into a mural, hire a graphic recorder — you will get a better result and I will have wasted less of your time.
Why a stand books this rather than another giveaway
An exhibition stand's problem is not awareness, it is stopping power. Delegates walk a hall deciding in about a second whether to slow down, and almost nothing on a stand is worth slowing down for.
Someone drawing is. It works because it is visibly difficult, visibly live and visibly for a specific person, none of which is true of a branded tote bag.
The second-order effect is the one that pays: a delegate sitting for three minutes is a delegate your team can talk to for three minutes, and they started the conversation rather than being interrupted.
Stand logistics
One square metre in the corner of the stand, ideally with the drawing visible from the aisle rather than facing into it — the point is that people passing can see the work being made.
No power, no table needed, no rigging, nothing to declare to the venue. Set-up is under five minutes, which means it fits inside a stand build rather than needing its own slot.
Two chairs help: one for the sitter, one for the next one.
Multi-day halls
Three-hour sessions, not eight-hour days. Portrait work at that speed is sustainable for about three hours and then the drawings start to tell you it is not, which is worse than a gap in the schedule.
On a three-day hall the pattern that works is a session pinned to each day's busiest window, advertised on the stand and on the event app. That way the queue happens when you want the queue.
Send the hall, the stand number and the days. I will tell you which windows to book.
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Check your date
Tell me when and where. If I am free, I will come back with what it costs and roughly how the day would run — usually the same evening.