I love improvisation, I love surprising myself, I love drawing, and –most of all– I love drawing people. Here is a little game I invented that combines all of my favourites. You can play with a friend, with a whole group but also just on your own. It’s quick, easy, fun and surprising. If you try it out, post a picture on Instagram or Twitter, add the hashtag #lotsoflittlepeople and mention me in the description (@evalottchen) so I can see the characters you come up with.

The game has 8 rounds that are explained below. Each player starts with their own paper for round one. After each round, you will pass your paper on to your left neighbour. If you’re two people, you’ll just exchange papers back and forth. And if you’re all on your own, you just do all the steps yourself.

The main idea is to let yourself be surprised by what you create. Before you draw something, have a look at what’s already on the paper. Instead of going with the first (most ‘logical’ idea) for what to add, try to go for something else, an unexpected twist or maybe even the opposite to what you wanted to go for initially.

The idea is to do relatively quick drawings, so every round shouldn’t take longer than a minute. Let’s start!

And that’s it. You just created a fun character together!

As a bonus, you can also turn this into a mini comic strip by passing the picture on two more times, drawing one image of what happened before in the first pass, and one image of what happened after in the second pass (each on a new piece of paper).

Below are a few characters we made at the VizThink Meetup Copenhagen and during the Sketchnote Barcamp in May and June 2020. I tried to find the names of people who drew those, but couldn’t identify all of them. If one of these drawings is yours, let me know and I’ll add you name.

Now I can’t wait to see which characters you will come up with!