This exercise was insightful.  I played picture charades with my family.  The rules of the game are simple.  You can’t talk or write the name of the film or book. Only by drawing can you communicate the name of a TV program, film, or book.

The films we had to draw were Good Will Hunting, The Dark Knight, Schindler’s List and Some like it Hot.  The TV programs were Lost, Sherlock, Friends, Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, and Modern Family, and the books were Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s Web, Moby-Dick and Great Expectations.

The words I struggled with the most were names.  I tried to use “sounds like” words like swirl instead of Will.  By getting my audience to guess some of the words in the sentence, they could easily guess the rest.  I have noticed that using the most predominant aspect of a drawing work best; for example, if you draw an animal’s ears, people can usually instantly recognise the type of animal.

Modern can easily be explained by using dates like 1918 for the past and 2022 for the present or, in this case, modern.  Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web was the most difficult to explain through drawing.  The closest word sounding like Charlotte is shallot, a type of onion, but that went right over my audience’s head.

It was good fun and insightful to observe the different ways to communicate through drawing. The drawings are nothing to look at because you try to draw as quickly as possible, but for this game, the main purpose of drawing is to communicate.