Session Three
Hello and welcome to the third of our Art at Home sessions! We hope you are having fun and enjoying the activities we’ve been suggesting. If you would like to revisit session two, you can find it here, or visit our hub here to see all of the sessions so far.
As we do each week, we’ll begin this session with an exercise we call Me Today. After Me Today, we have Heads – Bodies – Legs and Shared Drawing as our two quicker games this week, and Collage for our longer activity. You can scroll down the page to follow all the exercises in order, or use the buttons below to jump to particular activity.
Remember, it’s completely fine to adapt the exercises to suit you and what materials you have. The idea is to have fun, and absorb yourself in a creative activity, with no particular desired result – everyone will do them differently. As ever, we’d love to see what you create – please do send in your images to us on Facebook or Twitter, or email them to our art therapist, Rose.
Me Today
We begin with our Me Today exercise. If you haven’t joined us for our previous sessions, Me Today is intended to be a quick snapshot of how you are today – a little sketch, or a scribble, or a doodle, or anything you like. At the end of 8 sessions we will show you how to make all your Me Todays into a small booklet – a record of how life has been for you during these weeks.
We usually suggest taking about 15 minutes for this exercise, but since you are at home, take whatever time feels right to you.
Heads Bodies Legs
We’ll first explain how to play this game with two people, and then how to adapt it to play with more, or even to play on your own. To play, you’ll need some paper, and each person will need something to draw with.
First, cut or neatly tear your sheet of paper in half lengthways, so that you have 2 long rectangles. Give one half to your partner, and keep the other for you to draw on. It’s important to not look at the other person’s paper whilst they’re drawing, so sit slightly apart if you can.
Each person draws a head at the top of their sheet of paper. It can be any kind of head at all – a human, an animal, a robot, or anything you can imagine! You could give it a fancy haircut, a hat, jewellery, or anything you like. Give yourselves around five minutes to draw this. Once you’ve finished your head, leave two lines for the neck extending downwards, and fold your paper over so that only these two lines are showing. Then, swap papers with your partner. No peeping!
Now, starting with the 2 lines your partner left for the neck, draw a body. Again, this can be any kind of body you like, wearing any clothing or accessories that you want. This time, you’ll draw from the neck to the top of the legs. Leave four lines descending from your drawing, to show where the legs will start, then fold over the paper so that your drawing is hidden. Then, swap paper again.
Now draw the legs – using the 4 lines as a starting place. Once you’ve finished, fold the paper one last time to hide your drawing and swap again. Count to three, and then open the paper to reveal who or what you’ve drawn together.
How to play with more or fewer people
To play this game with more than two people, you need to have a rectangle of paper each. Instead of swapping with the other person, instead pass the paper to your neighbour – any number of people can play this way.
If you would like to try this game on your own, first draw several heads on bits of paper, and fold them over as described above. Then muddle them up, so you don’t know which is which, and draw the bodies without knowing which head they are attaching to. After you’ve finished the bodies, again, muddle up the pieces of paper and draw the legs. Then, open them up to see what kind of creatures you have created!
This game never fails to surprise, and usually delight. We’ve shown some examples here to inspire you, but we’d love to see what you’ve drawn too!
Our second exercise this week is also a way to draw with someone else, but this time without the element of concealment. You might still be able to surprise each other though!
First, get comfortably seated opposite each other, with a sheet of paper between you, and drawing implements to hand. Next, one of you makes a mark, or several, on the paper. This could be abstract or perhaps the beginning lines of a recognisable thing, such as a building, an animal, a human figure, or anything at all. Then the second person adds something to it – either continuing what has been suggested by the first person’s drawing and adding to it, or possibly taking it in an entirely different direction – whatever occurs to you. Try to make your turns quite quick – don’t give yourselves lots of time to think!
Try not to consult each other, or if possible, don’t talk at all – just take it in turns to add something, spontaneously, to your shared image, until you have filled the page or until you decide its finished.
Collage
We will be suggesting a few collage ideas in the sessions over the next few weeks, so do keep a look out for good material to use! Magazines, newspapers, colourful card/paper packaging, any printed paper that catches your eye, could be useful.
For this week’s collage, you will need materials to collage with (such as newspapers or magazines), as well as a glue stick, scissors, and a piece of cardboard or thick paper to use as a base. Flattened cereal boxes can be a great choice for a base.
Firstly, look through your collage materials and find a picture of a landscape. This could be any kind of landscape – countryside, beach, town etc. You preferably want to choose one without people in it, but that’s not crucial. You could make your own landscape by combining several images, or you might find one that looks just right on its own. Once you’ve chosen what you want, glue your landscape onto the card.
Now look for figures, such as people or animals, and place them in your landscape. They may be out of scale, or look funny, but don’t worry about that. Following on from our heads, bodies and legs game earlier, you could also try mixing and matching with figures, or cutting out & sticking on hats, boots, and so on.
Next, imagine what these figures might be thinking, or saying to each other, and give them speech bubbles cut from white paper. Where are they? What are they doing? Keep going with your collage until you feel like it’s finished, or you would like to stop.