At their core, discussion events and meetings are about the insights that matter to the participants involved in the conversation. But, sometimes, these insights get lost if the conversation grows stale or the participants start losing interest in the discussion.
To eliminate this monotony, you can throw in a few exciting and engaging art activities during your breaks. Here are some great ideas that can add a dash of colour to your next event or meeting.
Desk Alphabet
The best events and meetings always start with a good icebreaker. It’s an excellent way to fire up your participants for the discussion, which is why you must get creative with your activity to ensure this.
Desk Alphabet is a fast yet engaging way to get your participants’ thinking juices flowing. The premise is simple: going around the room, each participant has to doodle a desk item whose name starts with the letter of the alphabet on which they are.
Before you begin, prepare one sheet of paper (or a virtual whiteboard if you’re on a video call). Pass it to the first player who, naturally, has to think of an item with ‘A’ as its first letter, like ‘alarm clock’. The next player does the same, this time with an item that starts with ‘B’, and so on until all the letters of the alphabet are done. To save time, players can skip their turns. Smarty pantses beware: ‘a’, ‘an’, and ‘the’ don’t count.
Pix-cell Art
Let’s face it: spreadsheets are an integral part of our workflow. Sure, working with them may feel a little too serious most of the time, but no one ever said they can’t be used for a bit of fun now and then. So, in the middle of your next event or meeting, give your participants a fun breather by using spreadsheets to create ‘pix-cell art’.
Think of it like doing a colour-by-number activity, but on Excel, Sheets, or Numbers. What makes this activity even more fun is that there are so many formatted templates available for you to download. Or, if you’re up to the challenge, you could create your own!
Playing this game is also really quick and easy. Split your group into three different teams and provide each team with a copy of the same template. Whichever team completes the illustration first wins! To make things even more exciting, you can even set a time limit, giving the W to the team which completes most (if not all) of the template once the timer hits zero.
Art Director
This drawing activity’s a great way to sharpen your participants’ listening and critical thinking skills. Run this as an impromptu recharge exercise in the middle of your discussion if you start to notice a lot of yawns and droopy eyes around the room.
In this exercise, you, as the host, will direct your participants to recreate your own illustration. It’s up to you to decide whether to give them as much time as they need or if you’d like to raise the stakes by setting a time limit.
The catch? As the art director, you can choose between giving clear and specific instructions or being vague about how your prepared illustration looks. For instance, you can sketch a house before the start of the activity. Your first instruction could either be, ‘Draw a horizontally-oriented rectangle on the bottom third of your sheet,’ or simply, ‘Draw a rectangle.’ It should be proper good fun! (Just make sure those yawns turn into laughs, not groans.)
Pictionary
This is a tabletop classic that has stood the test of time. A favourite among people of all ages from different walks of life, Pictionary is one of the biggest pillars in the space of illustration games.
Many of us know how the game works. Players take turns sketching ideas provided to them by the host, and the rest of their team attempts to guess what the sketch is depicting. Winning the game is as straightforward as it’s always been: score the most number of correct guesses.
For the sake of adding more creativity to your art breaks, let’s put a spin on it. Instead of players creating sketches for their own teams, have them illustrate their selected idea for the other teams to guess. If any of the other teams get it right, that team gets the point. If they fail to guess correctly, the illustrator’s team gets the point. What’s a bit of healthy competition to spice up an event or meeting, right?
‘DIY’ Sketchnote
Last but certainly not least, you can ask your participants to curate their own insights and turn them into sketches for a live illustration of the ideas they bring up during the conversation. Research has proven that sketching or doodling whilst listening during a conversation helps people retain key information from the discussion.
The best part is that your participants don’t have to do all the work! You can tap an expert live illustrator to bring your group’s insights to life. A team like Ortus Draws is the right fit for your sketchnoting needs. They have some of the most talented artists in the knowledge-sharing sphere, and their live illustrations have been praised by business leaders across the globe.
It may not seem like a one-off breaktime activity, but watching their ideas take shape in real-time is sure to keep your participants engaged throughout your event.
Looking to discover other creative ideas to keep your events engaging? Stop by Ortus Draws here. With so much experience in adding colour and breathing life into live events, they have the solutions you need to make your next event more memorable.
Interested in creating a more engaging knowledge-sharing experience of your own? Contact Ortus Draws to book one of their expert illustrators to sketchnote your next event in real time!
