Art Icebreaker: Pass Around

On the first day of art class we played an icebreaker game that was well received. I saw the idea at KinderArt: #9 on this page.

Each student is given a piece of paper with his name on the back and a pencil. They have 10 seconds to make one type of line (wavy, zigzag, curved). When the time is up, yell, "Pass!" Students pass their paper to the left, and they again put one line of some type on the new piece in front of them. This keeps going until pages are covered fairly well. Say, "Stop!" and each student has to retrieve his own paper. He then finds the most interesting section and crops it down to fit the frame. The design is colored in (we used marker for more vivid colors); and they have an instant, nonobjective, modern piece of artwork.

I found 6x4 frames at Wal-mart for $1.50 each. Most of the students chose blue, green, or black. Pink, orange, and purple were not popular (despite there being girls in the class!). To make cropping easier, we removed the clear plastic protectors from inside the frames. Their transparency allowed the students to move them around to decide more easily on the best area to keep. They could then trace a line around them, color the area inside the line, and cut that out for the frame.

Nonobjective, abstract, or nonrepresentational art is artwork that doesn't look like anything you would recognize. Usually, the work is all about colors, shapes, brushstrokes, size, scale, and, in some cases, the process of creating it!