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The Ann Arbor Art Center asked me to create some experiential art events for a fundraiser last week. The objective was to get people who don’t identify as artists to engage in some creative activity–and they told me I had all the walls in one of their gallery to use. I immediately thought about the draw wall we used to run at A2CAF:

Which is a variation on an exercise I lead in my classroom: Great Big Giant Awesome Comic:

It’s an activity that teaches collaboration in a playful way, inspired by how cartoonists tend to draw all over everything when they’re hanging out.

This tends to be fun for kids and cartoonists, but adults who have talked themselves out of making art are another puzzle altogether. So I came up with a series of timed rounds wherein they only had one concern:

• Round one: draw colored shapes
• Round two: add details to someone else’s shapes, turning them into characters
• Round three: add word balloons to the characters so they are interacting

There was something mildly subversive about painting up an art gallery’s walls like that, which contributed to the good time everyone had. This was a fun one that I’d love to lead again.