CMU School of Drama


Monday, November 12, 2018

7 Fun Drawing Games That'll Flex Your Creative Imagination

mymodernmet.com: It’s no secret that the best way to improve your drawing skills is with a lot of practice. The same goes for flexing your creative muscles. Drawing games offer a fun opportunity to enhance your talents while challenging your imagination. Nowadays, you can play a variety of them on paper, your computer, or on a smartphone.

6 comments:

Kaylie C. said...

I was expecting this to be a post about actual tested exercises meant for improving creative and drawing skills. About half of this article is a series of ads with affiliate links. That said, there are some gems in here. Exquisite Corpse is a very real and very awesome game which I played with my classmates on our free time during our AP Art History trip to Chicago. It is a great game to stretch your imagination and always has some awesome results. Blind Contour and Paper Telephone are decent. We actually did continuous line drawings on the first day of drawing class this semester and it was definitely a way to test our spatial awareness. The rest of this article is thinly-veiled ads which don't actually offer much in the way of substance. I mean seriously? Draw Something? That game was popular in middle school and in no way should be used as an exercise in creativity.

Yma Hernandez-Theisen said...

I was first expecting Sara Barnes Article “ 7 Fun Drawing Games That Challenge You to Flex Your Creativity Muscles” to show ways to improve upon your drawing skills, but it feature instead ways to exercise them. Which left me pleasantly surprised, and even more helpful. Finding things to exercise your creativity muscles, finding things to draw, is something we all need help with every once in awhile, and is sometimes the main reason we find it hard to continually and consistently practice our drawing skills in the first place. This is extremely helpful, especially coming from me, someone who can find themselves with same face syndrome, I often find myself in periods of drawing the same thing over and over again. That could help me technically but not necessarily creatively. Right now I have found myself in such a period, so these 7 fun drawing games can be extremely helpful.

Emily Stark said...

I love drawing games. My friend Jojo and I used to play them all the time and would carry around paper just so that we could fill our free time. I think that they are a brilliant way to teach creativity young and stimulate the mind into problem solving. Exquisite corpse seems like a mad-libs drawing game. I bet it would be a lot of fun for artists to mesh all of their drawing styles and interests together. I love blind contour. It’s super challenging because we aren’t used to not looking at our page and drawing, but it presents a really cool challenge that’s low stress and always turns out really funny in the end. One of the greatest things about drawing games is that they are low stress and lighthearted. I feel like college turns our abilities into a numerical value of how good we are, but games are a great way to practice, let loose, and have fun while still developing creative, original, and collaborative skills.

Julian G. said...

I’ve played a version of exquisite corpse before, but it was a written story rather than a drawing. I’d definitely like to try the drawn version. I think it could work really well for a party game similar to pictionary or charades, but more novel since most people haven’t played it before. Draw a Stickman looked interesting so I played the first episode. It didn’t take very long (only about 5 minutes), but it was mostly a very simple story where you periodically draw the item you are told to draw. I wish I had more of an ability to make choices/ the way I drew things affected the outcome of the story. Maybe it did, but if it did I couldn’t tell. I actually did the drawing based on someone else’s random scribble game in my middle school (or maybe it was elementary school) art class. I could see it still being fun now.

Ari Cobb said...

I’ve played almost all of these drawing games before! I really enjoy them because there are no stakes in it, and there’s really no pressure to be a “perfect” artist. They were things me and my family would do around the table just for how funny the results can be. Exquisite Corpse is a really interesting one, because the end product is almost always insanely ridiculous and reminds me of those children’s flip books that has different monster body parts on different pages that can be flipped through to create different combinations. My mom also really enjoyed playing paper telephone with us too. It was fun when you get a lot of people from various backgrounds and drawing experiences together to do it because the final sentence can get pretty skewed. Out of all of the ones in the article, the blind contouring is the least like a game. I’ve done that to some degree in almost all of my arts classes. It’s a good exercise to loosen yourself up. The digital games sound pretty fun too, and if I have the time I’ll look into them.
One of the drawing games/exercises I like doing is something Yma and I did with the kids in our summer theatre production. We would have the kids list four completely unrelated things, (such as: octopus, robot, pineapple, dragon) and we would have to find a way to merge all of them together into one creature.

Maggie Q said...

As someone who is desperate to improve their drawing skills on the upcoming years this article immediately caught my eye. Upon the beginning it started out strong. I’m an avid fan of Exquisite Corpse. I play it with my younger cousins whenever we are on a long car ride or flight, with the best results from the day being saved and they sometimes pop up when I’m cleaning out my stuff at home. Authough Exquisite Corpse challenges your creativity it doesn't really stress your physical drawing skills, and I figured i'm not the expert and moved on in the article. When I got to the end I was severely disappointed this was no professional drawing or creative advice, this was a crudely written add for apps. Though the claim is far fetched and obviously untrue this in a clear example of false marketing. There seems to be zero policing by the website to check the quality of content that they post on the site. I truly hope the writers of the article don’t think an app telling you to draw a sword stretch and flex your creative muscles, but if this is the case the author obviously knew they were lying to the reader and that doesn’t sit well with me.