Blindfolded Painting

 
For:
Parties
Small Groups
Preptime:
Medium
Cost:
Medium

Blindfolded participants need to paint a prompt, which was randomly selected by combining a subject, an action, and a location. They will be guided by a teammate who is allowed to see and describe, but not paint.

There will be 2 rounds, so that every person gets to paint once and describe once.

Round 1

  1. Introduction
    Tell people that they will be paired up, take 3 prompts which form a sentence, choose who gets blindfolded, paint the sentence while one person can't see and the other can only guide with words.

  2. Form groups of two

    1. Assign a number to every person. To do that you can put people in a line and let them count from left to right.

    2. Use the Group Creator to create random pairs of numbers and let people with those numbers team up.

    Group Creator

    1. Let people with those numbers team up.

  3. Hand out materials
    Let people sit down and hand out paper + water cups + cardboard + paint. Here it's useful to have someone help you to speed things up.

  4. Take prompts
    Let each group take 3 prompts. First <Subject>, second <Action>, third <Location>

  5. Blindfold people
    Tell people to blindfold one person in each group. If there is a team of 3, then 2 people get blindfolded.

  6. Start painting
    Tell people to start painting. The person without a blindfold is allowed to help mix colors, but otherwise they can't touch the brush. They are only supposed to give instructions like "up", "down", "a circle here".

  7. Finish the round
    Keep an eye on how fast people are painting and tell people they got 5 minutes left, when you feel like it's time for the first round to stop.

Round 2

  1. Form new groups

    1. Tell all people who were just blindfolded to stand on one side and tell the ones who were guiding to go to the other side.

    2. Let the previously blindfolded side count like before, so everyone gets a number. Let the previously guiding people stand on the other side in a line. Enter the amount of guiding people in the Group Creator below and assign the random numbers from left to right. Now let the people with the same number on each side form a team. If there is an odd number of people the person left can join a random team to form a team of 3.

    Group Creator

  2. Repeat the steps 3 - 7 from Round 1

Materials:

  • Blindfolds: 1 per person (you'll survive with 1 per group).

  • Paper: 1 sheet per person (hard acrylic paper suggested, if you're sitting on the ground, so it doesn't flop around too much).

  • Paintbrushes: 1 per team.

  • Paint: Acrylic paint suggested – red, yellow, blue, white – but of course, feel free to experiment with any other painting/drawing medium.

  • Water Cups + Water: 1 per group. You can use normal glasses, old tomato cans, plastic cups, ...

  • Support for Paper: 1 per person (you'll survive with 1 per group). Something like cardboard to put the paper on.

  • Surface to Mix Colors on: 1 per person (you'll survive with 1 per group). Can be just a piece of cardboard or even the cardboard the paper is placed on already, if it's a big piece.

  • 3 Bags With Prompts: download basic prompts PDF
    Print and cut the prompts, then put them in the bags. 1 bag per color.
    The basic PDF contains enough prompts to play 2 rounds with 6 people.
    Feel free to create your own prompts if you need more. If you want to save some time you can also leave a bit of money (5€) here and buy the large prompt list I created. It works for up to 36 people :)

    I gave my best to make sure the prompts interact in fun ways.

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