Automatic Drawing: The Surrealist Exercise, Step by Step

Automatic drawing is the simplest of the Surrealist techniques and probably the most demanding: you put a pen on paper and let your hand move without deciding what to draw. Lines loop, cross and tangle. Only when the hand stops do you look at the result, and that is when pictures start to appear: a face in a knot of lines, a bird in a curve, a whole landscape in a scribble. The Surrealists believed this was a way to let the unconscious mind speak before reason could censor it.

If you already know froissage, the method will feel familiar. In froissage the crumpled sheet makes the first marks; in automatic drawing the moving hand does. In both cases the artist begins with something unplanned and then decides what it becomes. This guide explains where the method came from, how its best-known practitioners used it, and how to try it yourself.

Where automatic drawing came from

The idea that a hand can draw “by itself” is older than Surrealism. In the 19th century, Spiritualist mediums produced drawings and writings they said were made without conscious control, sometimes attributing them to spirits. Doctors and psychologists studied such automatic movements as well; Tate notes that the word automatism itself comes from physiology, where it describes involuntary actions of the body.

The Surrealists gave the idea a new purpose. Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s techniques of free association, the poet André Breton and his friend Philippe Soupault experimented with automatic writing: writing as fast as possible, without correction, to see what surfaced. When Breton launched Surrealism in Paris in 1924, his Manifesto of Surrealism defined the movement as “psychic automatism in its pure state”, the dictation of thought without the control of reason.

Writers could simply write quickly. Painters had a harder problem, because a picture usually takes planning. Automatic drawing, together with chance techniques such as frottage, grattage and decalcomania, was the Surrealist answer.

André Masson and the automatic line

The French painter André Masson (1896-1987) is the artist most closely associated with automatic drawing. Tate dates his involvement with Surrealism to 1924-9 and notes his experiments with automatic drawing in those years. He adapted the automatic writing of Breton and Soupault to the pen: a rapid, continuous line, drawn in a state as close as possible to absent-mindedness, which only later resolved into hands, birds, bodies or fragments of architecture.

His drawings from 1924 are often reproduced as textbook examples. Their lines are broken, repeated and uneven, which is exactly the evidence that they were not planned. In a second stage Masson picked out the shapes he recognised and strengthened them, so the finished drawing is a collaboration between the free hand and the looking eye.

Masson later found pure automatism restrictive and drifted away from the Surrealist group at the end of the 1920s, but the method stayed in his work and travelled with him: he spent the Second World War in the United States, where his automatic line was noticed by the young painters who would become the Abstract Expressionists.

Miró, Arp and other users of the method

Joan Miró is also named among the practitioners: many of his paintings started out as automatic drawings, free unplanned marks that he then developed into his floating creatures and signs. Earlier, Dada artists such as Hans Arp had already used chance operations, for example dropping torn paper onto a sheet, which our page on chance in art describes in detail.

Automatism also travelled beyond Paris. Tate notes its influence on Jackson Pollock and on European post-war movements such as art informel. In Quebec, a group led by the painter Paul-Émile Borduas called themselves Les Automatistes and signed the manifesto Refus global in 1948. The drip painting technique is, in a sense, automatic drawing done with the whole body.

How automatic drawing relates to froissage

Froissage and automatic drawing belong to the same family but start from different places:

• The source of the marks. In froissage the paper’s creases create the pattern; in automatic drawing the hand does.
• How much control you give up. Crumpling hands almost everything to the material. Automatic drawing still passes through your body, so habits creep in: everybody has favourite loops and angles.
• The second stage. In both, the real work is the looking afterwards, when you find an image and develop it. That stage relies on pareidolia, our habit of seeing faces and figures in random shapes.

Many artists combine them. You can make an automatic drawing on a sheet you have already crumpled and flattened, so the creases and the pen lines interfere with each other, or run an automatic line over a froissage ink wash to pull out the shapes you see.

How to do automatic drawing: the basic exercise

You need only paper and something that makes a line easily. A felt-tip pen, a fineliner, a brush pen or a soft marker all work; a hard pencil tends to drag and invites erasing.

1. Use a big sheet. A3 or larger gives the arm room to move from the shoulder instead of the wrist.
2. Set a short timer. One to three minutes is ideal. The time limit is what stops you from planning.
3. Keep the pen moving. Draw continuously: curves, loops, zigzags, spirals, dense knots and long open lines. Do not lift the pen and do not draw anything on purpose.
4. Stop and turn the sheet. Look at it from all four sides. Squint. Wait for something to appear.
5. Develop the image. With a second colour or a thicker pen, pick out the lines that belong to the face, creature or landscape you see. Add shading or fill some shapes with ink.
6. Repeat. Make three or four sheets. The first is often stiff; the later ones are usually freer.

The step-by-step box on this page repeats these steps in a compact form.

Variations to try

• Eyes closed. Draw for one minute with your eyes shut, then open them and develop the result.
• Non-dominant hand. Drawing with the “wrong” hand makes the line less controlled and less habitual.
• Music. Draw to a piece of music and let the rhythm drive the line, changing direction when the music changes.
• On a texture. Draw over a froissage sheet, a frottage rubbing or a bubble painting and let the existing marks pull your line in new directions.
• Group drawing. Pass sheets around a table, each person adding thirty seconds of automatic line, then develop the results together. This is close to the Surrealist game of the exquisite corpse.

Automatic drawing in the classroom

The exercise needs no drawing skill, which makes it an excellent opener for students who believe they “cannot draw”. A short sequence might look like this:

• Warm-up (5 minutes): two one-minute automatic drawings with markers on large paper.
• Looking (10 minutes): students swap sheets and find three images in a partner’s drawing, outlining them lightly.
• Development (20 minutes): each student chooses one image and develops it with ink, colour or collage.
• Discussion (5 minutes): who found what? Did different people see different things in the same lines?

Link it to a lesson on Surrealism using our overview of surrealist art techniques, or to the froissage lesson plan, which uses the same “make, look, develop” structure.

Common problems and fixes

“I keep drawing the same shapes.” That is normal; habits show up quickly. Change the tool, switch hands, change the speed or draw to music.

“I cannot see anything in it.” Turn the sheet, look from further away or in dim light, and give yourself a target: “find one animal”. If nothing appears, use the sheet as a background and try again.

“The drawing is too dense.” Shorten the time or use a thinner pen. A drawing with some open space leaves room for the image to emerge.

“It feels pointless.” The value is in the second stage. Treat the scribble as raw material, like the creases of a froissage sheet, and judge the exercise by what you develop from it.

Further reading on this site

Automatic drawing sits beside the other methods of the Surrealist period. For the wider story, read chance in art and the history of froissage; for another way of finding images in accidents, try blow painting with straws or the fumage art technique.