Family Drawing Time Anew: An Activity for You

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.  She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"  ~Howard Ikemoto

Ess' named characters

We have been enjoying lots of lovely family time of late.  Nanna came to stay with us so we enjoyed lots of giggles and games with her (as well as appreciated lots of washing up being done;).  An activity we shared together with her was inspired by Jeannette Rowe, a children's illustrator and author whom I recently met at a gathering at our local library.  We have been enjoying drawing together as a family for a while now, yet she inspired me to take that to a new level which everyone loved.  Even older children, adults and Nannas found this lots of fun and we had lots of smiles and giggles around the table from everyone.   Have a go!  You might find some undiscovered talent hidden in your family, as I did.

You will need:  2 pieces of paper for each participant, and at least 1 pencil for each person.

Simply hand out one sheet of paper to each person and ask them to divide it into three sections.  Explain that in the top section you need to draw as many different styles of eyes as you can dream of.  

The next sections will contain noses and mouths thus:

Once you have completed this master sheet, sign your page with your name.  It is now your own. You can even consider it copyright in Australia where you do not need to pay for copyright.  I signed mine © 2009 Cee Lew.  This will be a handy resource for later (containing memories from my little one :o).

For now it will be used to create numerous different characters.  Take another piece of paper and trace off a set of eyes onto it.  Hold it against the various noses to choose one which takes your fancy and trace a nose under the eyes.  To complete your face trace a mouth of your choosing.  I find that whatever I am making has a name, whether doll, drawing or critter.  This is revealed to me in the creative process.  Be sure to write that name down when you know it.

This next element is my own idea which I added for a little bit of interactive family fun.  We held onto the last paper with our own new character drawn onto it and passed around our sets of eyes, noses and mouths.  Our neighbour then created a character from our initial sketches. It was intriguing to see what was created from our own original ideas and positively reinforced everyone's efforts, especially the little ones.  This was a wonderful way to share our drawing styles and gain new ideas for ourselves for future drawing.  We continued passing around the circle until everyone had drawn a new character from each set of features.  To conclude we drew another of our very own characters from our very own initial set of eyes etc.

You can see little Eee has very much enjoyed this activity as well.  At only 21 months she is well aware that we can draw images and often draws while labelling what she is drawing saying "eyes", "nose" etc.   She and Daddy continued to draw these parts throughout our drawing time.  Once complete, she very specifically coloured those body parts on Mummy's sheet.

It was hard to stop, it was such fun.  Ess did not want to have her bath and requested we do this again.  So be prepared next time you visit our house, you may find yourself revealing more than you had anticipated ;)

Let us know when you have a go so we can come and share in the fun with you and your pictures.  Really, it is not too hard to be creative.