Painting Parties

The Collaboration Game!

An outreach and community building effort to engage people in creative collaboration through drawing, painting, and other creative activities. Painting parties provide an inclusive place to play and explore through art, great for beginners and experts alike! Bring your own supplies or use ours, the whole thing is really emergent!

This game provides the ground rules to help facilitate artistic collaboration between two or more people. It is meant to be an abstract art process that emphasizes interacting with your partner through drawing/painting, like a creative dialogue. The process takes about 20 minutes, and can continue indefinitely. The drawing phases help provide shared ownership, flexibility, fluid ideas, and reduce each person's attachment to the outcome. This makes the activity more about the process of interaction rather than the final product, which is less intimidating and more fun because the artwork develops in surprising and creative ways.

These guidelines can serve as a flexible guide to facilitate collaboration. Alter the length of turns as desired--it's just important to 1) begin with short turns and build up from there and 2) rotate the drawing/painting throughout the course of the collaboration. It helps if a person that has played the collaboration game before guides the beginner through the emergent phases from memory using rough time estimates for each phase throughout the collaboration.

Phases of The Collaboration Game

1-Line Turns (2 min) - each person draws one line--it can be absolutely any line, just draw one of them in a turn taking fashion (e.g. one line per person per turn)

2-Line Turns (2 min) - each person draws two lines per turn

3-Line Turns (2 min) - each person draws three lines per turn

Any Line Turns (4 min) - each person can express their full idea during a turn (~5-20 seconds)

Synchronous Drawing (3 min) - both people draw on the same canvas at the same time, focusing on their own section of the paper (nearest to them).

Rotate drawing 90 degrees (2 min) - rotate the entire drawing canvas to change which area each collaborator has physical access to; don't become too attached to any one idea in the drawing; keep it fluid. Do this every few minutes (e.g. ~2min)

Emphasize faces you see forming (2 min) - take a moment to examine the artwork and look for any potential faces you see forming. Emphasize those faces (e.g. add eyes, ears, nose, mouth) to make them look more like faces

Emphasize objects you see forming (2 min)- take a moment to examine the artwork and look for any objects that you see forming, e.g. houses, trees, sun, etc. Emphasize those objects (e.g. thicken their lines, add important features)

Discuss, Reflect, Strategize (2 min) - talk with your partner about the drawing. Explain the faces, objects, and story you see emerging in the drawing. Decide how you want to proceed together, i.e. come up with a game plan (i.e. which ideas to continue emphasizing and how to pull everything together)

Finalize Drawing (4 min) - implement the game plan and make sure the main themes, ideas, objects, and story are strongly emphasized in the drawing/painting (e.g. lines are consistently robust, neat, stylish, and expressive throughout the drawing)

Make it Legit (15-45 min) - work synchronously on whichever part of the drawing you feel most passionate about and make the lines thick and thin to emphasize the dynamic flow of the drawing. Keep in mind that this phase really makes the drawing into an artwork that can be sold or displayed, perhaps even in a museum someday.

Photograph Drawing - take a picture of the drawing so you and your partner can both have a copy. Notice the difference in the way the drawing looks in person versus on the phone. The smaller format makes the drawing appear more sharp and dramatic lines really stand out. It looks cool, right?!

Share Your Creation! Tell your friends how easy and fun it is to make cool art that you can hang in your house! Share the image of your artwork on social media, and add it to our gallery using #emergence #paintingparty!