4. Squiggle Monsters

Dream Together Set

Anything’s possible as children and adults play together as creative partners.

Start:

• Find some blank sheets of paper and a pen. 

• Practice drawing figure-of-eight-style squiggles and lots of overlapping ‘o’s.

• Close your eyes and draw your squiggles. The messier, the better. 

• Open your eyes and see if you can see eyes, legs, or a nose emerging. Start shading and colouring. 

• Keep going until your monster is fully emerged.  

Play

• Name your monster. The sillier the better. 

Try

• Swapping squiggles, or if playing with multiple people, swap with the person to your right. 

• Tiny squiggles, or large squiggles. 

Think

• What surprised you?

• What will you try next time? 

Know

• Inspired by: Automatic writing is used by creative practitioners to generate the unexpected. The surrealist artists of the early 20th century used a version of this called surrealist automatism.

• Main capability: Divergent thinking. 

• Main skill: Idea generation.