Back in the late 1990s, in collaboration with certain teachers, mentors and schools I was working with at the time, I modified my cartoon-drawing workshops into a comprehensive modular program that encouraged students to think more deeply about Emotional Communication, while teaching them hands-on drawing skills. This format became central to my teaching work in schools and other social care settings, and led to a variety of specialised workshops, programs and residencies over the next 20+ years.
In 2014 I began distilling this work into a library of drawing-based creative learning resources under the name thINK Draw Connect Learn. These resources include numerous modular learning activities organised into learning UNITS, and a range of innovative creative card sets.
In 2024, after many challenges and obstacles, I was finally able to publish the first of these card sets: the thINK Face Cards Starter Deck. This kit focuses on the power of drawing simple facial expressions to communicate a wide range of emotions and feeling states, from the more obvious to the subtle. Rather than having a complete face on each card, with the emotion it expresses spelled out for you, with thINK Face Cards you create your own facial combinations, and get to decide what you think the face is expressing. In this way, the cards encourage learning through interaction & dialogue, which can be creatively reinforced by the act of drawing the faces you create.
You can read about my Creative Communication schools program that led to creating the Face Cards (and the companion Body Language Cards) and see some fantastic examples of student drawings here.
The thINK Face Cards Starter Deck includes:
– 2 decks of 48 laminated picture cards (Deck 1: EYES / Deck 2: MOUTHS)
– 24-page booklet of ideas and suggestions, incl thINK dice-based Drawing Games and glueless thINK Dice template
– Sturdy slipcase box with deck divider
Dimensions:
Box – 125mmW x 172mmL x 40mmH
Cards – 105mmW x 75mmH
Booklet – 105mmW x 150mmH
thINK Face Cards are designed to be:
– a creative learning and thinking tool
– a self-guided drawing curriculum
– a counselling or therapeutic tool
– a creative resource for discussing emotions and building emotional vocabulary
– a drawing game that stimulates creative thinking, storytelling, mindful attention and reflection
For educators, social carers, child therapists & allied health professionals, homeschoolers, neurodiverse people and, well…anyone actually.
There is quite literally no limit to the ways you can use these simple cards. They are deliberately open-ended and non-prescriptive, to encourage new creative possibilities. Face Cards can be explored on your own, with family or friends, one-on-one with a client or with a large group (classroom / workshop / etc). They can be used as a fun drawing tool, a non-competitive drawing game, or without drawing at all, as a prompt for talking and thinking about feelings, social situations and life stories, human dynamics and emotional communication.
You don’t need any drawing experience to use these cards, but by drawing the faces you create, you can strengthen many parts of the brain related to memory, problem solving and imagination, and open up many new ways of thinking about things. The faces are made of simple lines and shapes (symbols) that are repeated in various combinations, and the more you draw them, the more you’ll develop drawing skills like line control, observation and spatial awareness too.
This starter kit contains two decks of 48 cards each – an EYES deck and a MOUTHS deck. Using a simple mix-and-match approach, the cards can be combined to create more than 2000 facial expressions.
The 24-page IDEAS & SUGGESTIONS booklet provides some simple springboard experiments & games to get you started, including a dice-based Random Ideas Generator to help you create hundreds of new cartoon characters.
Care has been taken to keep the images simple, clear, and uncluttered. This is to make it easier for users to copy or trace the images, to make visual processing easier, and to enhance observation skills such as symbol recognition, comparison and spatial awareness. The cards are laminated for extra durability (and easy to wipe clean!), and the corners are rounded for a smoother tactile experience when handling.
The thINK Face Cards are a distillation of the teaching process I developed over several decades, running drawing-based school programs that helped children use cartooning to explore Emotional Communication. Hundreds of appreciative teachers and thousands of students of all ages have contributed to the development of the cards through their enthusiasm, creative inspiration and diverse insights as we journeyed together – especially the students who offered important feedback because of their specialised processing needs. Many other thINK learning resources based on this work are to be released in the future. These will include a set of companion decks, the thINK Body Language cards, and a number of thINK MODULES containing drawing-based learning activities for exploring Emotional Communication in more depth.
This free pdf describes some of the Faces MODULES being developed, and some of the thinking behind these resources.