Trevor's Art-It

Trevor has been doing a lot of drawing recently.  He's always enjoyed drawing, but in the past his drawing has been mostly creating and decorating his own mazes, designing fun golf courses, or drawing imaginary chain reactions.  Then all of a sudden, he started asking me what I want him to draw.  After 50+ suggestions, I was totally out of ideas.  I tried having him come up with his own ideas, but he wasn't interested in that.  So I printed out some drawing games to spark his creativity, including this Monster Draw and this Roll-a-Miro.

Both are versions of art activities that have been around forever.  I did something similar with my students back in my teaching days, but it's something I've never done with Trevor. He was SO excited to try it.  Basically, there are two different ways to play.  You can simply roll one die, check the chart to see what shape you'll use for the first body part, then draw it. Or, if you use two dice, you can play a competitive game similar to Cootie.  We did the non-competitive drawing activity rather than make it a game.  Here's one of Trevor's first creatures:

 

And here's one of mine:

After we played a few rounds, Trevor announced that he wanted to make his own version of a drawing game and that it would be called "Trevor's Art-It."  We headed to the computer to make the grid.  He carefully selected the body parts and the color schemes for his chart, then we printed it out.  Then he designed each of the shapes, incorporating ideas from the two other sheets and adding his own ideas.  He asked me to copy his shapes onto the chart, as he didn't want to mess up on the paper and have to start again.  Here's his finished Art-It.

He was beyond thrilled with the final product.  We immediately played a few rounds of Trevor's Art-It. The first time, we both rolled the same color scheme:

 

Here's one more set of drawings:

 

 

We had so much fun with these!  Best of all, they have really sparked Trevor's creativity and he's no longer asking me for ideas of what to draw.  Win-win!