A story in five colors

Collaborative collages sparked by intuition and fueled by wine

5 min readOct 17, 2016

Taking a Leap

I used to do a lot of art making back in college and for a few years after. Eventually grad school, work, and life got in the way and even though I have a very creative job I find that I really miss expressing myself visually and exploring through intuition.

I have also been looking for ways to spend time with friends other than going to a restaurant or a bar. And so, Art Night was born. Using the Leap Kit from Experience Institute I’ve been working to plan gatherings with friends at my wife Marta’s and my apartment where we get together and create experiments through collaborative art games.

On April 30 Marta and I held our first Art Night with three awesome friends: Liz, Lindsay, and Nico. It was a blast!

A game of collaboration and intuition

I wanted to try an activity that encouraged us to use our intuition and build on each other’s ideas, without the pressure of creating something amazing. We tried a collaborative game with construction paper collages that we passed from person to person.

Here’s how our game worked. Each person wrote a word on a notecard, we shuffled the cards, and then each picked one randomly. For example, I picked a card that said “Travel.” Then, each person took their card and picked one color of construction paper. Using only that color they started a collage based on the word they picked. When we all finished our first round of colors, we passed our collages on to the next person and they picked a new color and added to the collage. The only rules were that we couldn’t use the same color twice on the same collage, and we couldn’t tell each other what our intentions were when we started or added to a collage.

This resulted in some really fun interpretations of the images we built.

How to make an image of the word “travel”?

Here’s a step-by-step example of what happened with the collage for the word “Travel.” Each of our thoughts about the image were uncovered when we discussed after finishing the collage.

Image 1: Eli’s idea was to start with an abstraction of a path moving toward the horizon that others could fill out in later turns. Of course, he couldn’t tell this idea to the group. He used blue as the background and kept the “road” white.

Image 2: Marta saw Eli’s image as an Egyptian pyramid (a great place to travel to!) and added a yellow sun and shadow to the pyramid.

Image 3: Liz saw the image as a path and thought Marta had tried to emphasize the direction of the path. With red she added emphasis to the path and birds to the sky.

Image 4: Lindsay, however saw it as a pyramid much like Marta did. With black she added small camels and a tiny person.

Image 5: Nico told us that he had seen the image as a path at the beginning, and then as an airplane wing after Liz’s turn. But by the time it came to him it was looking more like pyramid so he added desert and a sphinx in brown.

The final image is exciting because it reads as a minimal Egyptian pyramid scene, but also draws the eye right to the middle like a straight path to the horizon. Both interpretations seem to have come through, whether consciously or not!

Eli started with blue, then Marta added yellow, and Liz followed with red.

Lindsay added the little person with camels in black, and Nico finished it off with brown.

Collaborative collages inspired by a single word

Here are the rest of the 5-color collages we made, where each person had one round with each collage. Some are very literal, some are quite abstract, some retro, some goofy, some reminded us of places here in Chicago. Like with “Travel” it was fascinating how tiny decisions made at the beginning of each collage changed the entire outcome.

In order, the words that inspired each image are: