I had my birthday party last week. My birthdays for the past few years have had an art/creative group activity component. I had felt the well had run dry, but I've made it another year. This year we did speed drawing.

I went to OfficeMax and got a ream of paper (500 sheets), pencils, a sharpener, and way too many clipboards.

The activity was well received so I figured I'd share it out for others. Here are the rounds:

  • Warm up round: Everyone draws whatever they want in two minutes, then we share what we made. The host always goes first to break the ice.
  • Collab round: Draw for 1 minute , pass the picture to the right, until the pictures all come back around to the creators.
  • Collab round 2: Same but pass to the right.
  • Random round: Draw an object from a random Wikipedia article for 2 minutes. Flip through articles until you find one a majority vote agrees to draw, and expect it to take a bit of time to find one that's actually drawable.
  • Assigned drawing: Everyone writes down a drawing they want made and they go into a hat to be chosen and then everyone has 5 minutes to draw it.
  • Break time: Paper airplane contest for 15 minutes.
  • Freestyle final round: Draw anything you want in 5 minutes.

With a group of seven, it took about an hour and a half to get through everything. Don't worry, I did not win the paper airplane contest at all.