Activity Library
Draw a building's outline, then use hatching to build form through light and shade.
Build a face or figure from geometric shapes cut from packaging. No drawn features.
Write a kind, careful poem to an imagined clone of yourself. Lines, not paragraphs. The instruction is kindness.
Run your name through an anagram generator. Pick the strangest one. Use it as the title of a story and write the first paragraph.
Listen to Holst's Jupiter twice. Write a guide for someone who's never heard it. Hand it to a friend with the music.
Find a photo with a group of people. Pick someone in the background. Write a paragraph about who they are.
Sculpt for five minutes from a prompt word. Then write four very different titles for what you made.
Listen to The Hut on Chicken Legs while drawing. Then compare your drawing to the painting that inspired the music.
Carve a design into a rubber, then print it repeatedly across a page. Add pen details to vary each print.
Draw the same simple shape six times in a row, then change one small thing about one of them.
Sit somewhere and write three short sections: what you see, what it reminds you of, what could happen here. Then remove the headings.
Read a short story. Identify its structure. Write your own story keeping the same shape but changing everything else.
Pick a colour. Walk and photograph or collect every shade of it you find. Arrange your finds in a gradient.
Pick three humble household objects. Interview whānau about each. Write museum labels and display them as a tiny exhibition.
Place a stone on a page. Move it around for two minutes while your pencil follows. Lift the stone. Title what's underneath.
Collect words about a place. Find chords — words that sound good together. Write a poem using your chords. Read it aloud.
Paint a portrait using only three or four flat colours and sharp edges. Title it with the colour you chose.
Make the same image twice — once as silhouette, once by drawing only the space around it.
Write 35 facts about yourself, cross out ten, then arrange the remaining 25 so unlike facts sit next to each other.
Invent a pet dinosaur. Answer six questions about it including what it believes in. Then write a paragraph introducing it to a stranger.
Hunt for hidden details in a famous painting. Annotate what you find. Add thought bubbles for three characters.
Choose a painting. Read Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts. Find one tiny detail no one would notice. Write a short poem about it.
Cover a page in tiny dots for fifteen minutes. Then cover a small object the same way. The object becomes something else.
Find a piece of work you're proud of. Photograph yourself. Answer what, why, how. Cut anything that sounds like someone else.
Choose four contrasting images from the Met archive, cut shapes, and arrange them into a photomontage at different scales.
Walk for ten minutes. Write one word per minute. Arrange the ten words around a circle on the page.
Make a list of things from when you were younger. Use 'my' often. Shape the list into a rhyming poem.
Interview someone born before 1975. Ask one good question. Then write their story in the first person, as if you are them.
Stick one flat scrap into your journal each day for seven days. After a week, write three words that describe it.
Write the same small scene four times: from your view, from someone else's, from a third person's, and from a non-human view.
Paint four sheets of paper. Put the brush down. Cut shapes from your painted sheets. Arrange and glue them down.
Pick one simple thing. Draw a 4x4 grid. Draw your thing sixteen times, each version different.