How should I break the ice?

I have a painter friend who teaches lots of workshops that combine painting with therapy.

She uses initial painting with one’s non-dominant hand as an ice breaker.

Aviva Gold; Painting from the Source

Some good ideas and examples on her link ^^^.

Just relax and be yourself. You’ve got enough personality to pull it off. You could ask the describe yourself question or something along those lines. But I think they’re lame. Or ask for a funny story from the audience, but you’re relinquising control of the room. I like gail’s idea.

@Seek_Kolinahr, we had a beautiful Painting with a Twist locally that just went out of business. I wanted to have a party there but didn’t get a chance. Do you have a theme for the paintings or do the participants just paint whatever they want to paint?

I find it amazing that you have problems with being the center of attention! Your real persona must be quite different from your fluther one!

But I always like the drawing upside down exercises. It always surprises non artists to see what an accurate drawing they can produce if they forget the preconceived notions and shift to the other side of the brain.

If you want an ice breaker that is not art centered, try this one:

Pass out blank index cards to everyone and ask them to write 3 things about themselves that no one in the group knows. Collect them, shuffle them, and read out loud. It’s worked for me in classrooms and gets people thinking about their fellow students in new ways.

Have people go round in a circle asking one question of the person on their left. That person answers, then asks a question of the person on their left, and so on. The group can set their own tone by the type of questions they ask.

@bkcunningham At the Painting with a Twist, the instructor walks the group through how to create a pre-determined painting. You have enough freedom to do your own interpretation according to your whim and skill level, but everyone ends up with basically the same painting. here are some examples

The only thing I don’t like about it is that there were so many people, there’s no individual encouragement. The woman sitting next to me got halfway through, became frustrated at her painting not looking like the instructor’s, and black-washed the whole thing.

So she effectively spent $50 on a painting class that did nothing but reinforce her own insecurities in her creative ability.

This is exactly the opposite of what I want this girls’-night-in to be. It’ll be a small group – probably myself and six other women.

My idea is to, instead of walking them step-by-step through a specific picture, allow them each to choose a symbol that means something to them – whether it be a religious symbol, their Zodiac sign, a heiroglyphic or a rune, or whatever – and help them to express that on canvas in colours that appeal to them. That way, each woman has a piece that directly reflects something about her, that she created. We all spend so much time focussed on our jobs, our kids, our significant others… who takes a night to indulge entirely in themselves anymore? And why aren’t we worth that indulgence?

Anyway, that’s what I’m trying to acheive here. If it’s successful, we’ll probably make it a monthly thing.

I wish I had a chance to do it before they closed. Anyway, going from your description, I love @Hawaii_Jake‘s suggestion. I read somewhere where you pass around a roll of toilet paper. Ask each person to take as much as they think they will need. You don’t give any other information. Then each person has to tell something about themselves based on how many pieces of TP they took. If they take one square, they divulge one personal piece of info. Two pieces of TP; two items of personal info and so on. It doesn’t sound very classy, but I thought it sounded fun. Of course, you’d have to buy organic TP paper for the women.

Since this is a drawing class, you might enjoy starting them out with a game of “Picture Telephone”.

As kids we all played Telephone, where you whisper something to the person next to you, who then whispers what he/she thinks she heard to the next person, and so on, until the secret comes around to the originator, who gets to compare what secret started the chain, with how it ended up.

Picture Telephone involves each participant writing something of her own on a piece of paper, such as one person’s writing “The cow jumped over the moon,” for example, and passing that to the person on her right. (Each player makes up her own expression, and doesn’t tell anyone else what it is, except the person who it’s passed to gets to read it. Make a hard rule at the start of the game that whatever expression you use to describe / demonstrate the game play cannot be the expression used. So at our game I would now say “You can’t use ‘The cow jumped over the moon.’”)

After receiving the original phrase, the player on the right then has to draw (on a separate piece of paper) what was written and passed to her, and pass on only the drawing to the person on her right. That person interprets the drawing and writes in words what she sees, then passes that description to the right, and so on. Part of the fun is making the timing pretty strict: players can’t take more than two minutes to make the drawing or the written interpretation of the drawing.

The beauty of Picture Telephone is that everyone writes a phrase at the same time to start the game, and from then on everyone is involved at varying stages in writing, interpreting or drawing, and there’s a lot of laughter as pictures and descriptions get passed from hand to hand and people exclaim in wonder at “what the hell am I seeing here?” and “how can I possibly draw that?” There’s also a lot of “I can see what you had on your mind!” If you have seven participants, then you’ll each have seven pieces of blank paper for your drawings and written interpretations, and when the last pages have been passed – and the final drawing or interpretation of your original phrase has come back, then it’s time to divulge, “this is what I originally said, and here’s how it came back to me.”

It’s a hilarious game. You may not get to do the class at all.

If there’s going to be wine and refreshments, why not have a mini-party before the painting session begins? This can be done under the guise of waiting for some late-arrivals to join the group. If you spend 15 or 20 minutes sipping wine and chatting with the ladies, the entire room might feel more comfortable and at ease.

@CWOTUS That is a GREAT idea I love that game! It’s always so funny!

The Outcome

There was one more girl there, who left before the group photo was taken. The ladies did a great job, even though I was nervous as all hell, and felt like a bumbling idiot telling them all what to do.

Future projects will be more free, I think. And we’ve all decided to get together once a month at someone’s house for some project, whether it’s someone showing us all how to knit, or glass etching, or whatever. Someone even mentioned stained glass, which would be awesome.

Super nice, @Seek_Kolinahr. It looks like a perfect outcome.

There was a group like that when I lived up north. Only we met once a week and it was fantastic the diversity of knowledge in that small group. I learned about mosaic, fabric printing (which I love) felt making (which bored me to tears) enamelling, painting, drawing. The list goes on, it was great fun and no one had to bring food! We just made art!