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Automatic Drawing

Artist Catherine Jo Morgan says "Automatic Drawing is a kind of yoga for artists. That is, it's the key to becoming centered, whole, and flexible. A brief session of automatic drawing makes a great start or end to the day.

Regular yoga practice loosens the body and relaxes the mind and spirit. Automatic drawing, or "free drawing" as I like to call it, does the same for the artist self. It's both relaxing and freeing.

Best of all, free drawing or automatic drawing is a direct line to the center of the self. It's a way to help yourself make all your art from that center. This means your development as an artist proceeds in a natural way, true to your inner being."
 

 Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper or Etch-A-Sketch.

In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed.

Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing whilst physically taking control of the medium's body.

Automatic drawing was pioneered by André Masson. Artists who practised automatic drawing include Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was transferred to painting (as seen in Miró's paintings which often started out as automatic drawings), and has been adapted to other media; there have even been automatic "drawings" in computer graphics.

Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographic suites of the 1960s.
 

Most of the surrealists' automatic drawings were illusionistic, or more precisely, they developed into such drawings when representational forms seemed to suggest themselves. A group of French-Canadian artists, les Automatistes, abandoned any trace of representation in their use of automatic drawing.

This is perhaps a more pure form of automatic drawing since it can be almost entirely involuntary — to develop a representational form requires the conscious mind to take over the process of drawing, unless it is entirely accidental and thus incidental.

Automatic drawing techniques
 Catherine Jo Morgan explains it well:  "The key is to make a conscious decision not to control the drawing. Take a blank sheet of paper, pick up the pencil, and just watch the marks your hand and pencil make. You're the observer, not the controller.

If thoughts come to mind as you watch, notice them but let them pass through. Don't dwell on any of them. If necessary just repeat something to yourself like "Whatever comes out is fine."

Keep drawing till you have a sense of completion. Then set that drawing aside and pick up another blank sheet of paper. Start again. Let the pencil move freely."

You can use any pencil or paper to begin your automatic drawing.  However, a very soft pencil (say a 6B or even 8B) is recommended.  In order to do as many drawings as possible, it is important to find a source of cheap paper.  You can get creative here, using recycled office paper or any white paper you can get your hands on.

Excerpts from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

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