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Human beings and interaction — Get your people to interact

Drawing of peoples' faces, bodyparts, body-sizes and -shapes and different people, young and old.

Stick figures can work for a lot of scenarios, but several of them interacting isn’t one of them. They tend to look very alike, not letting you differentiate them when you need to.

Key takeaway: How to draw people. How to make them interact. Emotions, middle aged, young, old, different looks and body shapes.

Workshop setup — part of Draw to communicate workshop series.

1. Draw a human being (2 minutes)

Tell your participants to draw as many humans they can. Rectangular body, feet, eyes and mouth will later help you understand which way your human is pointing.

Drawing of a human being and the parts that makes up the drawing

 

2. Draw emotions (3 minutes)

Add as little details as possible. No emotions needed, skip the mouth and eye-brows.

Tell the participants to draw (30 seconds on each drawing)

  • Without emotion
  • Happy
  • Surprised
  • Sad
  • Angry

Faces with different emotions

 

3. Draw different ages (3 minutes)

Tell the participants to draw (1 minute on each drawing)

  • A middle aged person
  • A kid
    Kids have larger heads compared to body size, closer to square body and smaller arms and legs compared to body size.
  • An old person
    Add age appropriate accessories and maybe bend the body shape a little?

Drawing of a middleaged person, a child and an old person

 

4. Draw styles and body shapes (4 minutes)

  • Draw as many hair and face styles you can (2 minutes)
  • Draw as many body styles you can (2 minutes)

Different hair styles and body shapes

 

5. Interaction (3 minutes)

  • Someone arguing or one person yelling at another
  • Two people sitting by a desk, talking.

A person pointing at another and two people talking at a desk

 

6. Draw a group of people (2 minutes)

Skip details to draw groups. Make the body rectangles merge, and remove some arms and legs.

  • Draw a group that is either happy, angry or confused

Group of people talking and looking a little agitated, arms raised and shouting/talking.

That’s it!

The third part of the workshop is done. You now know how to draw human beings and make them interact!

If you need help or want to discuss some aspects of this? Contact me on LinkedIn, or create an issue over at GitHub, and I’ll try to help you out.