Creative Exercises: 6 Prompts for Fun Doodles & Creative Play

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Jon Burgeman. I'm an artist, I'm a duddler, I'm a maker of fun stuff, and this is my new Skill Share class. My style is spontaneous, it's improvised, I use a lot of colors, I use a great lot of characters. I've been dabbling in animation. Each project I work on, I maybe have a little idea about what I'm doing but I'm not entirely sure how it's going to end up, and that's exciting for me. The kind of work that makes me the happiest is when I lose myself in it. It's when you kind of forget space and time when you enter that kind of flow, and you're just enjoying, exploring the material, seeing what happens, seeing what you can make it you do. That's when I'm really happy. Look at that. Now looks like the eyes are moving. So, the class will consist of a bunch of really fun exercises, designed to just get you making stuff, not worrying about whether it's good or bad, or whether it's going to fail, and hopefully within each exercise, there'll be a little spark that you will take this inspiration that can lead you to something else. That's mine. It's mine. No, it's mine. It's mine. This is a book that I made. It's called It's Great To Create, just a little mantra that I like to say when I'm sharing my work. The exercises in the class, some of them are sort of inspired by some of the exercises in the book, and yes, the same spirit of play, and experimentation, and having fun creating stuff. Oh my goodness, this is my mom. You might recognize that I'm still wearing the same sweater, jumper, or whatever you guys call it from the last class. I thought it would be good for continuity and to share just about skills for you to create. But what else from the last the class is coming back? Yeah. That's it. How are you doing? It's been a while. I'm sorry for putting you in that box. Well, you're out now. It's fine. We're going to make some art together. Are you excited? Let's get started, right? All right. The team is back together. 2. Materials & Supplies: So, the absolute basic materials that you will need for this class, I would say some felt pens, we've got some crayon blocks, chalk, very fun to use, some scissors to cut stuff out with, some paper to draw on, maybe a little glue stick or some glue. I've got these pens which are watercolor, so you can draw with them, but you can also use a brush. Paint pens. They're fun. They can go on any surface. Gouache paint, and you can get nice flat bright colors, kind of a little pricey, so I also use a lot of acrylic paint. This is just cheap and cheerful acrylic paint, which again is bright and it's really great because it dries very quickly. A spoon. I'm going to put this in the category with this little plastic tubs for water and paint. A white sticker labels. You can get these from a stationery store or office supply. One dot turns into an eyeball. Googly eyes. Always have some googly eyes with you. Later on, we're going to be customizing some packaging. So, you might want to raid your cupboards and see what you've got in there. I think one of the, if you're seeking inspiration, and certainly what I do, is I go to the art store and I buy something I've never used before, and then see what I can do with it. Let's see what the material can do. Let's see how it acts. That's the best way to innovate and come up with unexpected uses for things. This class isn't just about being a homemaking stuff, it's also about feeling great of making stuff out and about. So, I have a little travel kit. This is my backpack that I've probably had about 20 years, and I thought I'd show you guys what I walk around with everyday just in case something sparks inspiration and I want to make stuff. Googly eyes, I made these into badges, buttons myself. This is a little repurposed tin of mints that now house googly eyes and cartridge. Pins. My own stickers in case I want to give them to people. A little roll of tape. Very useful. Wet wipe taken from somewhere. Mywipe, luxury hand wipe, probably from a restaurant, in case my hands get sticky making things. Various black pens. One of these coffee stir sticks useful for putting stuff on. Anyone guess what might be in here? Why it is cheese? No, it's a stick of chalk. Chalk is really a great material to carry around with you. You can draw on the streets and not permanently deface anything. So, I like to call chalk the polite graffiti tool because it's non-permanent. I think the most important tool is a pen and paper because even if you can't actually make something while you're out and about, you can document your ideas, and you never know when inspiration is going to strike. So, always, always have a little notebook or a means of writing down your ideas. These are very modest cheap tools, but for me this is within the realms of what I want to make on the go. I feel strangely empowered by having these objects on me because I know I can make the stuff on the go, I'm always looking for opportunities to do that. It's all about it being accessible. That it's not an effort to make stuff. I find myself working when that's the case. That is my travel toolkit. I can confidently go out onto the streets and make stuff, customize stuff. So, now we've talked about materials, let's go and use some. 3. Exercise 1: Combining Colors: So, for this exercise, what we're going to be doing is making a mess. Mixing up all colors, getting to know all materials, and just being a bit brutal with them, seeing what they can do, and having fun, and loosening up. We're going to just loosen up. Ease into the other classes and things. Let's just mix up the light and dark colors. That's kind of what we're going to do. We're not going to take any kind of care, just scribble. The best way to understand how these things work is just by going a bit nuts with them. Already, you can see something that's really nice about felt tips is that when they go over each other, it gets a little darker, and that layering is fun. So, let's try it with a different kind of marker. We're going to use Paska pens like a paint marker. How do they react in the same way? Is it the same kind of thing? What I like about this is because they're a little bit more fluid, the pen is taking the darker color with it, and we're getting a lovely kind of gradient. Put one color down, get maybe a lighter color, scribble over the top, see what starts to happen. Get all these nice little accidents, little things you can't necessarily plan. Yeah, just like learn a little bit more about that material. Let's try these watercolor pens. While you're doing this, secretly what is happening is you're not really giving too much for consideration to what you are drawing, and that's actually a really good thing. So, you think you're just testing your pens, but really you're just loosening up your hands, your hands eye coordination, whatever you are making. You're not really worrying about it. That's really a great thing especially for people who are always a bit concerned about is this good, is this not good. All right sometimes it's difficult not draw a face. What else can we try? I like to use acrylic paint because it's cheap and cheerful, dries quickly. So, we're going to just put a little blob of yellow in here, and then we'll put a little bit of reds in here, and then we're going to drop in some water. Mix them, like cooking or something. Now, we have a nice watery paint. If it's not thick enough you can get some more paint. I want it nice and fluid because what we're going to do is, we're just going to put some on the page. It's going to drop on. Looks a little like blood. Then we'll put some yellow. Just see what happens. I like to do this and then not even paint, just roll the paint around and make a mess. You can already see like some of this marbling, the way it reacts, it's kind of interesting. So, painting without even doing anything, just using gravity as one of your tools. All right, we get some nice oranges and yellows, and you can add some more stuff and see what happens. It's not meant to be anything. It's sort of seeing how things react. Should we use this Craney things? Never really used this before. So, let's see what happens. I guess I kind of like ink sticks, a bit Craney. Oh, not very strong. Feels a bit like chalk. Let's see what happens. So, I'm going to immediately go for a light color, and then a dark color. Because I'm pushing quite hard, you can see the texture of the table comes through the paper. It's kind of interesting. Let's just finish this one. So, then these are quite nice. Look at that. Just a bit of water from a brush, and now we're painting, and we're making a mess and that's kind of gray. We can do similar kind of thing, and who knows what that will be. We can let it dry and work out later. Hey, let's see what happens if you draw on top. Again, it's not about making something, it could just be decorative. It could be abstract, it could just be something weird, drawing of a monster having a bad morning breath. It doesn't really matter what it is. Like that's the point of the exercise. It's just to like play around with the materials. I think this is a great first exercise because while still testing out your materials, you are inadvertently loosening up, and you're letting go. You're making marks on the paper without actually thinking about making marks on the paper. If you're a little overwhelmed by this, and you're not really sure how to start, here's what I would do. This is what I would advise, I would just pick something. You have to put ink in your hand, don't even look, draw any kind of shape and try and color in without looking. So, there you go. I've drawn a perfect circle. Now, I'm just going to do a different shape. I'm going to do it on the same paper. I'm not even going to look, I've drawn a pyramid. Lovely isosceles triangle, I'm going to color that in, I'm not worried about what I'm drawing because I can't even see it. So, that's okay, and then I might keep doing that. Put the thing down on your table or desk, just so you don't accidentally ruin it or color outside the paper, which is likely to happen. But you can just keep doing that and building on that, distracting yourself. Put some music on maybe, just keep going, and then maybe I'll go back to the first color I picked, and also aim away from where I scribbled. Very quickly, you can build a quite and nice Rothko ask fields of color and see what happens. There you go. If you can turn the paper upside down, you can rotate it, so it looks different from the strokes in different directions. Just keep, and just keep going. It's great not to always have a blank page to begin with, and this helps us get beyond that. I hope by the end of the exercise that you will have feel warmed up, you feel confident to just have it go with things, you're a bit more familiar with your materials. Maybe you've used them or seen them in a new light now, and you're just yeah, energized and ready to go for the next exercise. Hey, how are you doing? Even Burke seems to be making one. Let's have a look what you've made. Can you see that? What's that painting of? You don't know, that's the whole point. But it could be anything right? What do you think it could be? You were in testing. Well, that's nice. That's good. Well, we'll put it in the fridge at home. Well, do you want to go to the next exercise? All right. High five. 4. Exercise 2: Making a Rorschach Test: For this exercise, we're going to be doing a very simple Rorschach test, which is a test that psychologists use, I don't know if they still use, where you make a blot and then you say what it reminds you of or what it looks like. The reason I really like this exercise is you're only doing half the work, folding the paper, and letting the inkblot paint, press on the other side, completes the drawings. So, you only have to do half the work, which is brilliant. So let's get going. Again, we're creating something but we're not really worrying about too much what it is until later. It's kind of training our brains to look at things and re-evaluate what they might be after the fact. This is super simple. All you really need is some paper and some paint, any kind of paint. I'm going to be using acrylic paint and I've watered it down, mixed it together with a brush, and then we're ready to go. First, is do the fold at the beginning. We're just going to fold it, don't need to be too careful. There we go. Now, we're just going to make a blot, let's do on the other side. Add a little extra blot to it and lots of paint. Don't know what that is, doesn't really matter. Squash it down. Good to make sound effects with your mouth while you're doing it. Then we're going to open it up. What is that? Not sure. Could be anything, but let it dry and we'll come back to it in a moment. All right, let's do another one. I guess psychologists, psychiatrists, people that use this kind of things, I guess they try and tap into your brain will see what it wants to see, and it will make things it wants to make, and that will reveal something about you. Maybe that will happen when you do this exercise. So let's see, oh my goodness, it's my mom. Sorry, mom, I'll tidy my room, I promise. Look at it, she's really angry at this task. I know that's what you're thinking about. My mom always would say, "Tidy room, tidy mind, " and she would probably freak out if she saw all the clutter and chaos here. But a little bit of chaos is okay, mom. Anyway, see what your Rorschach will reveal about you. Are you sure you want more? What's that Burgsy. One more. Okay, one more. So, let's see. Let's do it this way. See what happens this way. I'm going to include just a bit of red. Like that, perhaps. Just a little bit of yellow. Like that, I don't really know what we're doing. That's fine. Maybe even a little bit blue. All right, let's squish. That's kind of cool. I might even just tilt this up and let that extra little bit run down. But look at that, look at these nice gradients, little soft colors and things. Very nice. Well, let that dry and we'll see what it can be. Keep in mind while you're making this, just having fun. Again, it's exploring what the materials will do, how the paint will react about the pressure on it. It's about mark making and shape making without thinking about it, without worrying about it. Start to combine things, play around with it, this is just a very starting point. It's for you to explore and see how far you can take it. I don't know what this looks like. Let's put a sticker on that. So immediately, we've made little character without even realizing it. You don't have to mirror them but it kind of looks cool. I might be inclined to add a little nose perhaps. Or you can just start to elaborate on it. Maybe some teeth. Now they look a little bit evil, sorry about that. Let's give it some evil. Like that. I'm not really sure, that looks a bit like a rabbit. You could draw around it. Like that. That's a little rabbit. I'll give it a fluffy tail. Yeah. So again, it's just a starting point, you might go, "Wow, this is kind of a cool character. I'm going to redraw that now on another piece of paper." It's just something you didn't think of that now it's in front of you and you can work on it. You could combine them. This to me looks a bit like a torso. So we could have that there, we could put my mom on the top like that, we give her some hands. Like that. Here we go. Look at this. All right, I'll get in trouble if I say it's my mom, so let's just say it's a person. But look at those yoga pants, I mean, I would wear yoga pants like that. So, here we have a little person that we made. A little Rorschach portrait. So, this is a great exercise for generating shapes, generating marks, and not worrying about what it is and then going back to them and then working it out. Burgsy, have you been having a go at this one? Maybe squash your piece of paper, you want to squash it? Very good squashing. Should we open it up, see what you've made? All right, here we go. Ready? Let's do it together. Oh, wow. How could you? Did you? That is amazing. What were you thinking of? Is this? Oh, it's a picture of your mother. Well, there you go, there's Burgsy's mom. That's incredible. We'll add her features then and we can send it to her. Okay, so now we've got our hands a little bit dirty and our minds working. We can move on to the next exercise. 5. Exercise 3: Drawing on Glass: So for this exercise, we're going to be drawing on glass. What I like about drawing on glass is, it makes you think about your drawing in a different way. For one, it's a lot less friction on glass. So it's a lot more thinking about the contact of the brush or the pen on the surface. It's two-sided. You can look on the front of the glass, the back of the glass, might be a door, or window, or something like that. I want you to take away the idea that there are other surfaces, glass included, that you can make marks on, that you could draw on, you could might work on, maybe you haven't considered in the past. I am going to be using these Posca pens to draw on the glass. You can find these online or in stores. But you can probably find other paint markers, chalk pens, or just experiment and see what you've got and see, and test a little bit. Where can I get some glass? Now, you might want to use a window or some glass door or something you might have at home, but it might be better and more sensible to test on a frame. We've got a float frame, so it doesn't have a back to it which is great, so we can look at the image back and front. But you could just use an old picture frame. Best to try out, you must try on something not too precious, like your front door or something. Okay, so let's begin. Let's draw something that I really like which is pizza. So all right, I'm going to draw a triangle. You can join me in doing that. Now, I'm going to put some eyes on it. So I'm actually, going to leave a space for the eyes, but you can draw on top. But try and avoid drawing on top too much because sometimes the wet pen will pull away the ink that's already on the glass and that's a bit frustrating. Now, I'm going to add a crust to my pizza. Another thing you'll notice is, you can see the pen marks, the brush marks, and it's quite tough to get it super, super flat. If you don't have these pens, you can totally do this with just acrylic paint. You could water down the acrylic, not too, too diluted. Let's add some toppings. So this is going to go directly on top of the yellow. It's kind of taking okay. Let's have tomatoes, maybe a little pepperoni, whatever do that. Okay, now we're going to add white. Now, I think the white always looks really nice on glass. Never, unless you work on colored paper, never did get its full benefit of working with white. So this is quite different to how I normally work. Normally, I do the outlines first and then add the colors. So in another way, you're just having to re-think about how you make it work and that's good. Change the order in which you do things, add some little feet, whilst it's drawing let's see what it starts to look like. So it kind of looks like an old school animation cell. It's nice and flat and we can see all the little pen marks and things on there. So let's now add some black to the eyes, right? It's not quite dry. You get the idea. I see the yellow is dry so it's a lot dark. The black, hasn't bled into the color underneath and it's quite nice to draw on. All right, we just go around his eyes. Nerve racking moment. All right, that's our little pizza dude. We'll draw something else here. We'll do it the other way around, just so you can see what it's like doing the black outline first. That's right, it is a doughnut. So we've put the black outline in first. Now, we need something for the frosting. It's going to touch a bit of that black and get bit messy. But hey, it's not the end of the world. So we're going to do that and we're going to mix and match like having the outlines. We won't have any outline around that pink frosting. So, classic, Simpsons asked doughnut and we'll use this gold again because it's very nice, and you see, because the black outline has dried. If we're gentle, we can go right up to it and it won't bleed into the color. So I'm being quite gentle and careful not to go too heavily over the black because it will rub it off off the glass. Let's look at it from the other side to see if it does indeed look quite clean. Yeah, look at that. So you can see the difference. Look at the eyeballs on the outside of the glass now, compared to how it is on the inside. You can do some really nice clean works. You can probably do with another layer of color but you get the idea, and there's a little gap in the glass. So use the material for it's matrix special ability. If you're going to draw on glass, maybe take advantage of that transfer nature, build in little windows for people to poke their heads into, and stuff like that. All right, I'm going to finish off drawing on this frame, and we'll have a look what I made. The cone pattern, let's see if we can do that underneath. Let's do the buns. I'm going to give this hotdog a smile. I'm just going to leave a gap in the glass. So work carefully, go around the black here. I think you get the idea. Let's do the actual ice cream then. It's a good opportunity to use the white. These are dribbles. Orange, orange for the color like this. I'm going to try and keep the pink outline underneath, and very, very gently. Hopefully, we'll see those pink lines and then the orange behind it. What else you can do on a glass? Glass is also really good for blending colors. I just show a little bit. There's a yellow, the red, and then they're going to meet and you can mix on there, and that is quite nice. You can do that quite easily and it keeps the color awake. So you can really keep playing with it. Make some nice gradients if you take your time. You can very carefully use a razor blade and scrape up along the glass and then the paint will all just come off, rather than putting lines down, you're removing them, creating artwork by the light coming through the glass. I'm just doing this with one of my fingernails, yes, super quick and fun to do this little character person. It's kind of interesting. Anyway, there you go. So you could make a scene like that and then if you wanted, you get some colored paper and put it behind. A lot of old school animation was shot with glass paints. It's another fun thing to do with glass. Hey, Bogsy, look. I've drew some of your friends. Do you know who these guys are? Can you point to the pizza? No, that's a doughnut. Can you point to the hotdog? Doughnut. All right, one last try. Can you point to the doughnut? Yeah, very, very well done. 6. Exercise 4: Customizing Consumables: So, for this exercise, we're going to be looking at objects around us every day, and we're going to customize on some. I took my groceries, grocery labels, convenience foods, package things, they're all around our house. Why not use those as a canvas for your creativity? One of the things I really like about this is you get to take something that we kind of ignore most of the day and we're very familiar with. We get to subvert it, we get to change it, we get to play with it. By doing this exercise, I hope that you'll, again, see creative opportunity out there in the world that you might not normally pay attention to, you might not normally expect to see at home or some things don't opens the cupboard and confront it with something. It's fun. This is something that someones already designed to catch your attention. Half the work's done for you, which you know we like a lot, so how can you re-engage with it? How can you play with that? Marker pens, paint pens, stickers, tapes, scissors, paper, those are going to be the tools of our trade for this. All right, let's get started. In fact, I couldn't wait to do this one, so I've already started. So, we've taken a box of cereal. How can I tweak it in a really subtle way that blends in with the packaging as it is but changes a little? Corn is one letter away from scorn. I've made some S'. We're going to glue that on. We have a not very good glue stick, just obliterates the thing. You're going to be gluing and then carefully paint it off. Of course, we're not trying to trick someone into thinking it's not what it is, just enough to make them give a second look. We can have some scorns of a chicken, like that, maybe you can give it little eyeball. There, it's not very happy. So, that is a very quick simple one. It could be a good marketing thing for Kellogg's Scorn Flakes. But let's see what else we've got on the cupboard. We have some fluff. So, like with fluff, we could change the layers. Fluff could be lots of things, could be a little eye here, and this could be a little mouth with that little nose, maybe. Maybe it's not as funny, but it's cute. I think that's okay for the fluff. It's a cool packaging even though it's probably poisonous to eat. Hey, we have some chickpeas. So, this could be fun and we could put little faces on the chickpeas. So, what I'm going to do here, I'm going to use a white pen, it's a bit drippy. Let's see. So, what I might do is I might dot some eyeballs and all that. This pen is a bit leaky. It doesn't matter, we'll just leave it like that for now. We'll maybe let that dry, but already it's cute. Maybe you want to play with the actual objects, so what's actually what the food is. So, we have this strained tomatoes here. So, maybe if we turn this tomato into a character, maybe it wouldn't look that happy because it knows what's about to happen to it. Something like this, we could just put some stickers on that little O, looks like a mouth, so we can look at these two stickers. Maybe we could do a little baby one. We can have a little speech bubbles coming out along. So, that's another thing. I apologize to the design people that made this for what I'm about to do. The cool thing about Campbell's Soup, though, it's so iconic, so recognizable. I'm sure it's still make out what it is even though I'm ruining it like this. Does it look like anything else? Maybe I should work in marketing. I don't know if there's been a crossover with Pokemon, but when this dries, we can turn it into a Pokesoup or something, gotta catch them all. But anyway, there is that. So, yeah, a black marker pen is your friend as well in that regard. So, there we go. You can tell a little story with the characters, so also what you're doing. That's even better with all it's tears. There we go. So, that's our little tomatoes soup, little strained tomatoes. Let's see if these chickpeas are dry now, even though I smooshed up half the bottle package very not quite, but we're just going to go for it. Apart from this guy, it's got to be switched. So, there you go. So, if you start to see this in the stores, following this Skill Share, you'll know where they stole the idea from. But yeah, there you go. Look, that's a lot of fun. It's going to make you smile more when you're reaching for your chickpeas. You can apply this not just to groceries, but other stuff that you might buy around the house. See what you can find in the cupboards that you can draw over. This exercise really is about mischief, I think, and playfulness. What they mean to you, what they might mean to your family, what they might mean to your kids, or what meant to you growing up. It's already inbuilt into the products because we've lived with them for so long. So, something to think about when you're playing with them is to play on that fact. Food packaging and stuffy fun around the home. This is just again at the starting point. You could stick to the former, you could coluche the former, you could cut stuff like by any means, putting on ink and painting the whole box turn it into a little city escape, whatever you want. Did you enjoy that one, Birdy? What? You wanted- no, you can't open that. We have to wait until dinner time. Don't you- no. 7. Exercise 5: Making Eyes: Googly eyes, they are a lot of fun. This exercise is about googly eyes, which is eyes in general. You may not be aware of it, but I like to put eyes on lots of different things, since objects into characters makes characters out of anything. So, eyes are super cool, super important, super easy to make. We are going to be making some eyes, and then going out, and maybe putting them on stuff and creating some characters. You might think most cartoon eyes look the same, just a circle and a dot in them. You can do so many variations on a theme, like for just as a little interesting challenge. Just for fun, I drew some eyes of cartoon characters that I really like, and they are all quite distinctive. I just drew the eyes. You can probably tell some of them, if not all of them, who the characters are just by their eyes. I am going to show what I do, what I like to do. So, for googly eyes, you can just go online, and you can buy in some lots of art stores or craft stores and things have googly eyes, labels from stationary stores, office supply stores. Guess what? You can go online and just buy circular pieces of wood. Someone has already cut for you, and then you can paint them and turn them into eyes, and then just very simply draw around it, and draw around it, and then get pen, and make an eyeball like that, like a sheet of them. Cut them out. There you go, and then you are ready to take them outside, or inside, or wherever you want. We can really express a lot about character through the eyes, so we want the character to look to the right. We'll have the pupils leaning in towards the right. If we want them to look to the left. Rotate the eyes and put the pupils looking at the left up and down or maybe a bit dizzy. Placement of the pupil is really key, and then some of the little tips. If we cut the eye in half, just to illustrate the eyelids down can make the eyes look a little sleepy like this. Maybe they look a little sleepy, little suspicious maybe. We can make the eyes, we tilt them in, angry, like that. Maybe a little desperate or sad, or just tired. So, play around with the shapes of the eyes where the pupils are. We can make some interesting expressions, and really tell a thing about the characters as well. So, for the exercise, what I want us to do is, we are going to take some of the eyes we have made or purchase. It could be the cut outs, wooden eyes, or little googly eyes you can buy online or from a shop. I am going to go out and look around the neighborhood to see if we can turn something with the placement of these eyes into a character. Hopefully, we will use part of the environment as an integral part of our character. "How are we going to put them on the character?" you might ask. We need some masking tape. We are not looking to permanently deface anything, or to have the eyeballs withstand the storm. Really, we just want to put them out there, maybe take a photograph and even remove them. We can get some masking tape. We are going to tear off a little tape. We are going to roll it over itself like this. We are going to stick it on the back of our eyeballs like so. So, you could prepare this beforehand if you want it. Now, it is ready to be placed on thing. I will put it on my shirt, where someone beat me to it. All right. So, let us go outside and see what fun we can have. Okay. Bye. It is a happy little tree. Here we have a mail box. It is the object that a lot of people are quite familiar with. It has got a moving part. It's a lid. It's a mouth. So, we can use that as part of our character design. So, what we are going to make now, put some eyes here, so they stay on. It is a little windy. So, now we have a fully functioning character that can talk to us. How are you? I am good. How is your day going? It is really full early up and now I'm quite empty. Thank you very much. So, there you go. It's a funny little character. All right. We will take these with us. Fighting over the little thing. No, it's mine. It's mine. No, it's mine. It's mine. All right. Very simple one. Try and like bring out some characters, some story in the objects, like what it is doing there. You're trying eat all these trash, all these sand. I am never going to finish you all. He's feeling pretty sick. He is overindulged. So, try to make the eyes like every little element of it trying to tell you that story, tell you what that character is feeling, who that character is, even in saying really silly and simple like a submerged coffee cup in a dumpster. 8. Exercise 6: Giving People New Bodies: In this exercise, we are going to swap people's bodies. So this exercise is fun because we're showing that hey you can even use other people as your props. Something that can be played around with customized use. Let's see what we can do with a friend or someone that you find willing to help you out. Yeah. Another human to interact with or maybe not another human. If you have a pet that's very well trained. Well some kind of cyborg partner, you could use them as well. With a pen and paper and just playing with perspective, you can change how something appears, and how it looks, how you may respond to it. So you using very very little. You're using your body or another person and perspective. So it's super super simple. So we're going to draw a new body on a piece of paper and then we're going to hold it in front of a person and then using our cameras, or our phones, or camera phones, we will take a picture and it will look sort of like the person has got another body. It's a bit like one of those things you might find on the beach or a fairground where you put your face in and you're given a new body. It's a bit like a super low fi, we can make it ourselves. It's a lot of fun. I made some replacement bodies. All I've done is draw on the bodies, this is a robot body, made it very quickly. Just on a piece of paper and that's some sort of strong man body. You will see I've kind of cut a little curve of the top. Sometimes that kind of helps. I would say if you're doing this with a friend and they have long hair, then it can be kind of cool to draw the long hair that might reach down in the top of the body, again like we've been to the exercise, that we're trying to blur the boundaries between our imagination and reality, and this is just a very simple way of doing that. So we just need someone to participate in this exercise. Anyone? Anyone?. So here we have a willing participant. So I've thrown a little mermaid sort of body, sort of fish body thing and a little bit, let's just see what happens. He is going to hold it up and close one eye. Am going to try and line it up. But really am lining it up on my phone because that's where I'm going to take the picture. If I hold the piece too high then it doesn't look that integrated. So sometimes it's good to hold it high then you just slowly bring it down, bring it down, until you feel it kind of clicks. The more you make them, you can tweak them, maybe I should've made this narrower for example, or cut it deeper or maybe I'd color it in grey. Now that I know the person's wearing a grey top. Let's try another one. Lets try the strongman. Do you want to pull a strongman face? Perfect. All right, it's kind of funny. So I made a little ballerinary one, and I've added some arms to it. So here we use these little butterfly pins, whatever they're called. I forgot what they are called. We'll double check what they are called. Maybe look up. So there you go. But you know, you could use someone's face and redraw that body, you could redraw their head and keep their body, or mix and match and play around with the photographs and see what you can come up with. 9. Animating and Sharing Your Work: Well done, doing all the exercises and having fun I hope, whilst doing them. So, along the way hopefully, you will have taken a few photos, maybe even a little bit of video or something of the stuff you've created. I'm constantly taking pictures and documenting what I'm doing, because I never quite know what I'm going to do with that stuff, it might be useful, I might need to refer back to it and it might be extra content that I could use and post online. You already made the work and that was fun. If you took a few pictures you could string them together, turn them into an animation or something like that. There's a few different ways we can do that. Just showing quick, quick simple things using tools that are out there that are free. Let's start with everyone's favorite, making a GIF. Now, I'm going to use an app called Giphy Cam, which is made by the people at Giphy. It's super cool and it's free, and you can just turn something into a GIF. So, hey look, we're going to go into the camera roll images that we've already taken they're saved on the phone and if we press along we can see some of the photos that we took. Now, inadvertently we may have made something that we could sort of animate. We only need two frames really to do an animation. In fact by clicking back and forth we can already see how that might work, but we took a few more of these. So, what I'm going to do is going to press and hold for a second and you see the number one appears on that image. Then I'm going to select number two, and number three, and you don't have to put them in order, number four and there's a bunch of images. You can see it kind of animates and we can use this scrollbar here to make it go faster. Whoa, maybe too fast. They're not perfect but that's part of the fun of it. You can see it's a little bit homemade. So, that's cool, I'm going to hit next, it's going to take a second and we're going to save GIF. So, we can save it as a video as well, and you can see it's got the social buttons so you can post straight onto Instagram, Twitter, don't know what that is and your messages. Straight away we've made a fun little video, a little GIF and we didn't even know we were going to do that, we were just messing around before. So, let's go into Instagram and see what we can do using the tools that are free in Instagram. We're going to press this little camera icon in the top left corner. That takes us into story mode, and you'll see we're on normal so you probably know that if you just tap that button it'll take a photograph, and press the X to get rid of it, and if you hold it down, it takes a video, but we've got some of these other modes which are super fun. We can go to boomerang. Boomerang it's like a very short video that plays back and forth that goes around and around. I guess it comes back and forth like a boomerang. So, just give you a very quick example of a fun boomerang that you can make. So, I'm going to draw a little eyeball there, an eyeball there. I'm going to hold the phone above, going to tap the screen to throw a focus in. So, it'll make the eyes look to the left, and then hold the paper underneath. I'm going to move it whilst I record the boomerang. You've got to remember the Boomerang is only a few seconds long. So I'm going to do that. So I want to frame, look at that. Now it looks like the eyes are moving. Now, I can use the tools in Instagram, I press the pencil, I pick a color, I draw with my finger. Suddenly we have a little face. I could draw some ears, like that, some legs, and look at that. Within a few seconds we've got a little animated character looking from left to right. Again, you can hit done. We can save it. Save to the camera roll. We can post it onto our story. There's another feature I'm going to show you quickly in Instagram. Stop motion, which I don't think a lot of people really use, but it's exactly as you'd imagine. You can take a picture, move something, take another picture, move something, take a picture, move so on. It's probably good to put your phone on a tripod for this, but if you don't have one just use what you have. Move something, move something, move something. Now, I finally hit done in the top corner, and here's a little stop motion. So now, the eyes moves, the pen becomes a nose. It took a few seconds to make. Again, we can save it as a video. Another tool within Instagram, the rewind function. So, we're going to start recording, and then we're going to stop recording and now you going to say it looks like the pens are just getting up by themselves. Attention, you could write something funny like, "Come on pens, let's get ready for work," and up they go. There you go. So, rewind is great, it's just playing with time. Time is another medium that you can play with creatively. So, you can see that it's really easy to combine these, put these things together or to take stuff you've already made and just add another little extra use to it. Now you know these very accessible easy tools out there where you can put them together, turn them into an animation, turn them into a GIF. Share them, put them in a video. Combine Low Fi and Hi Fi. If I take special pleasure in using super high end equipment to make something look a bit crappy. 10. Final Thoughts: I just want to say thank you very much for taking these exercises. I hope you've enjoyed the class, I hope you've enjoyed hanging out with me and Berksie here. If there's one thing I would really love you to take away from taking all the exercises is that you can create, you can make stuff, you can have fun doing it. That's why I really, really wish is that you have fun and you will feel inspired to make stuff and maybe pass it onto your friends and your family and then you can all be happy making things. It's great to create, isn't it Berksie? He's contractually obliged to say that. All right, we're nearly there, we're nearly there. We're still that boring, come on. How many takes have we had to do? One, two, focus. All right, then we can have cake. I'm looking forward to the cake. What? I can see crumbs on your face. You ate the cake? All right. Let's just get on with it. It's the last time we do a class together. So, if you like, if you got the time, you can do the six-day challenge, which you can take exercise a day or you can do one exercise for six days. What I'd really love you to do is document it, share your great adventure with us all. We'd like to see, wouldn't we Berksie? Yeah, and that's it. So, I hope you've had fun, let me know what you thought of it all, try new things, experiment, and share all that stuff, and we'll see you another time. Bye from me and Berksie. Bye. 11. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: