Everyone can draw

Approximate time: 1 hour

PowerPoint slides: 3 to 8

Exercise sheets: none

Aims

To create a playful and relaxed atmosphere and help participants rediscover the joy of drawing and sharing their drawings with others.

Rationale

“These exercises are designed to help you rediscover the pleasure in drawing as a means of playful expression. Young children enjoy drawing because they are not too worried about their drawings looking exactly like what they see. Instead, they are able to enjoy making marks on paper and expressing themselves. So, try to remember that drawing is not about ‘getting it right’, or even creating beautiful pictures, but rather about communicating who you are and how you see the world. It’s a bit like your signature: the main thing is its uniqueness, not how neat and easy to read it is!”

Exercises

This section includes five exercises that are illustrated in the next steps. Depending on how much time you have available and how familiar your participants are with drawing, you can choose to do all or only some of the exercises in this section.

Allow 5-10 minutes per exercise. Participants can use any drawing tools, including pencils, felt-tip pens, crayons, or whatever they remember they enjoyed using as a child. Encourage people to try different drawing tools.

If they wish, people may share their drawings with others in their group, but this should be entirely voluntary. Participants may also choose to collaborate in the creative process. For example, in the Doodle monster exercise, you can ask participants to create a doodle shape and then swap them around so that each person will be transforming someone else’s doodle into a monster. Keep reinforcing the idea that everyone can draw and that it is about participants enjoying themselves while drawing and not about how talented they are.

If you want to run a DrawingOut workshop, please complete this authorization form.