Graham Shaw. Cartooning is easy with NLP. (and a lot of fun too!!)

Graham brought along a lot of super pens and other materials to help us play and soon had early arrivees setting up tables, and plastering the walls with flip chart paper. We were eager to start and the group included some young NLPers, or NLPers’ young. Some artists and lots of keen, eager non drawing adults.
After a brief introduction Graham gave us a demonstration of the power of drawing live in front of an audience. He chose a sample introduction for a course on ‘efficiency’ and using both flip charts contrasted the hopeful with the organised. The cartoon characters developed before our eyes and this was so compelling many of us would have happily watched him draw all evening.
Now it was our turn. Graham led us bit by bit to draw a cartoon face.
First the nose Then we added eyes
next a smile and then an ear at this point the face could become a boy or a girl. We started with a boy by adding boy’s hair. Gave our boy a neck. And finally a T shirt.
This was, like Graham had said, really easy! No stopping us now as we drew a girl
turned our boy to look the other way
and generally had great fun filling our paper with faces.
Graham showed us how to change the expression by changing the shape of the mouth, adding glasses, changing the hair, adding clothes and a body or parts of a body. What we noticed is that ‘less is more’. Using cartoons as a metaphor its good to leave plenty of space for your audience to make their own connections.
Right about now we took the break and returned promptly for the next exercise. Splitting into pairs we found a piece of wall with flip chart paper on it and drew a joint cartoon face.
The instruction was to take it in turns to draw a line. So the first one drew the nose, the second put in the eyes and off we went. There was a lot of laughter and good humour as the faces developed, because neither of us knew where the face was going there was a feeling of freedom and of course a temptation to test our partner to follow our last line and make the face come alive. Once we had finished our joint masterpiece (see a fine selection here), we then filled all around the edges of the paper with smaller faces. A real opportunity for individual flair and idiosyncrasy to surface!
Then time for a tour around the gallery to marvel at our composite creative talent. (A personal thank you here to the artists, for keeping to the paper and not straying onto the walls with your exuberance).
We reconvened and Graham opened a discussion on his use of NLP in what he had been doing with us tonight. There were clear language patterns he had used. He had chunked us up and down. He used ‘present state’ to ‘desired state’, without realising he had done so! (NLP is always best when operating at ‘unconscious competence’ level.) He used positive frames. “Is it easier this way or that way?” We learnt even more about NLP and how to use it all the time. Graham learnt some too!
And so for the finale... we were all going to draw Einstein. This is my version. There were others that were arguably better but paraphrasing an ancient Chinese proverb, ”Man who operates computer, print what he bloody well likes!”