Team Drawing Night at Monster Drawing Rally 2005, Southern Exposure

“Drawing Night” started back in 2004 as a way for a group of friends to get together more, and draw more. We meet every month or two at someone"s home for dinner, vino, and an extended session of lunatic scribbling.

The group has always been a shifting mix of artists and self-described “non-artists”, with the agreed-upon agenda being simply to make and share things that are imaginative and silly, to draw for love of drawing, good company and good food. It"s about friendship and play, as opposed to learning how to draw “better” in any conventional sense of the word.

Typically, we start by eating and drinking. We then do timed warm-up collaborative drawings, like " 30 Second Exquisite Corpse" where we draw quickly for a half-minute, then pass our drawings to the left.

In the “Words Game,” 10-minute drawings are generated by whatever 4 words are picked at random out of a hat. If the words end up being “Bunny,” “Terror,” “Swimming Pool” and “Taco,” everyone must figure out how to incorporate all 4 items into the narrative of their drawing. It gets ugly, quick.

Most of our drawings are collaborative, or generated by chance: this does a pretty good job of dismantling bad habits, preciousness or other ego/authorship concerns. All of our drawings are timed, rarely lasting more than ten minutes: this removes any slowpoke wishy-washiness or self-consciousness, and puts folks into “action” mode. We rarely take or trade our drawings: they all just get deposited in the “Drawing Night” box.