Icebreaker: Art Class Warm Up

Purpose

This icebreaker is ideal for art classes on various topics such as illustration, drawing and painting. Suppose you want your new delegates to get to know each other better while at the same time gauge how good they are at illustration. You can reach both goals with this easy activity.

Objective

Discover more about your partner and capture this in the form provided. Illustrate the person by including symbols that represent their character.

What You Need

• A copy of the “About the Other Person Form” for each delegate.

Setup

• Distribute a copy of “About the Other Person Form” to each delegate.
• Divide the delegates to pairs. If you have an odd number of delegates, pair one person with yourself.
• Explain to delegates that they need to first find out about each other and fill in the questions shown on the form.
• Explain that each person has about 10 minutes to find out about the other person.
• Allocate a total of 20 minutes for this part.
• Next, ask delegates to illustrate, paint, or somehow graphically represent the other person in the area provided on the form based on what they see and what they have discovered about the other person.
• Encourage them to use clever symbols to embed useful information into the drawings.
• Allocate 15 minutes for this part.
• After the allocated time, ask everyone to lay all the forms on a table and stand around it so they can all see the forms. Lay the forms in a grid so it is easy to go through them one at a time.
• Start from one of the forms and systematically go through them. Ask everyone to look at the specific illustration. Ask the person who filled it to state the name of the person who has been illustrated and point to him or her so everyone can familiarise themselves with people’s names. Next, the person should tell everyone about the person they have interviewed based on the information they have collected and illustrated in the form.
• Move on to other illustrations and repeat until everyone has talked about their partner.
• You have the option to keep the drawings for reference or get back to them in later courses if you have multiple sessions with the same group.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 20 min interviews + 15 min drawing + 15 min sharing the info with the group = 50 minutes

Group Feedback: 0 minutes

Discussion

N/A

Variations

Depending on what you want to cover in the course you can adjust the type of questions asked in the form. For example in this form, delegates find about each other’s favourite movies. This allows them to talk about the movies that have impressed them so they can understand each other’s interests. You can replace this or add questions if you have more time with the following:

• Favourite artwork
• Favourite illustrator
• Favourite painting
• Favourite graphics software, graphics gadget, accessory, etc.

Don’t add questions on things that are a matter of taste rather than reason or are too far away from art. They can always find about these themselves but you don’t want to allocate your precious exercise time on such topics. Don’t include questions on topics such as these:

• Favourite food
• Favourite pet
• Favourite colour
• Favourite holiday
• Favourite teacher

About the Other Person Form

Your name: ________________

Name of the person you are illustrating (your partner): _____________________

What is your partner’s background/profession: _____________________________

How good is your partner in the skills covered in this course (rate 1 to 5): _____

What does your partner want to get out of this course (name 3 things):

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

What is your partner’s most favourite hobby at this moment:

___________________________________________________________

What is your partner’s most favourite movie and why:

___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

Your illustration of your partner:

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