Drawing together

Three powerful exercises

Creating together in a cafe, or a community center —drawing, collage, writing or some combo—creates common ground. It’s even more electric when you add a simple collaborative project.

Here are three incredibly simple exercises that you can try alone, or with friends. If you are feeling brave and in the mood to create change, see if you can organize a gathering in your local library or community center. Even if you don’t have friends and don’t feel brave, put up a poster and see if you can make some new friends, and when you draw and write together you are no longer strangers, and it’s easier to feel brave

1. Here and Now.

   This exercise chills your nervous system and balances your brain, through the magic of sensory engagement and objective observation.

Park yourself in either a public cafe or nature spot Set a timer for six minutes. Using your sight, hearing and sense of smell, write sentences that begin with Here and Now. (Can abbreviate to H&N). Go fast or slow as you like, but savor if possible! Read out loud.

2. Visual Poetry.

Draw the shape of an animal you love and write a poem about or to or from the animal within the form.

3. Shared Dreams

Each participant has a sheet of paper and some drawing materials. Set timer for three minutes. Begin to draw your dream community (or a scene from your ideal future earth) and pass the paper, setting the timer until everyone has hands on each sheet. Set them out for a table gallery, admire and photograph your work and each person gets to take one home.

These work well for youth groups and senior groups, if you are a teacher please try them out and let me know how it goes!

After a few decades of teaching community art-making, visual poetry and my own quirky creative writing workshops, I landed in an international zoom group where I was one of 20 or more international peers. We still meet monthly to draw together.

This group was formed by medical people and graphic novelists and comic makers who founded the Graphic Medicine movement, which is all about using comics to heal by way of conveying information and expressing and exploring one’s own experiences, usually in an empowering way.

Creative jamming takes many forms.

Last summer I ran some Kingston workshops where we made dream flowers and poetry butterflies and wrote our ideas of freedom on birds of our own design.

At the Broadway Bubble we made a made a bilingual community art gallery. At the Kingston LGBTQ+ Community Center we did a collaborative and cathartic collage.

At Rough Draft Bar & Books we had one community collage butterfly garden and one Fantasy Writing night where we did collage and wrote guided journeys to our own private gardens.

The fun thing about community art is you never know who is going to show up, and because it is free or highly affordable, it is accessible to all.

Watch this spot for more workshop ideas. Every drawing together group and workshop I’ve encountered has been worthwhile, and even the facilitators of paid workshops usually offer tons of free tips and support and content.

See you out there, friend.