Automatic Drawing – What it is and Why You Should Try it

Automatic drawing, similar to asemic writing, is an art technique that taps into your subconscious, loosens up your creativity muscles and allows you to explore drawing without the burden of your brain being all overthinky. Sounds good, right?

The more time you can spend letting your unconscious mind call the shots while making art, the more comfy you will feel in the flow state – the place where the best art originates.

We’re going to take a look at the origins of automatic drawing and see how you can easily incorporate this simple concept into your own art-making. Ready? Yay! 👏🏽

What is Automatic Drawing?

Basically, automatic drawing is just drawing without thinking. As much as you can, you let your conscious mind take a rest, and you move your drawing tool across the paper almost as if channeling. Anyone who has ever meditated knows this is easier said than done, but with practice you can access that subconscious flow state much more easily.

Truly our best art comes from that combo of muscle memory and detaching from conscious thought and control. Essentially, it’s the ultimate drawing warm-up exercise!

Sources differ on who ‘created’ or discovered automatic drawing. I see a bunch of sites attributing it to the surrealists. They, starting with André Masson and Joan Miró, were fascinated with all things dreamy, unconscious, magical, etc, and were deeply influenced by Freud’s ideas at the time.

However, it looks like english artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare may have been practicing automatic drawing and writing even before the surrealists. Spare wrote several books and explored mysticism and the subconscious in both his art and writing, starting in the early 1900’s. He produced two sketchbooks featuring his automatic drawings in 1924 and 1925. (Incidentally, Spare is a fascinating person, greatly influencing many with his ideas on art and magic. That Wikipedia article is worth a read!)

Automatic drawing by André Masson, 1924, ink on paper, made in Paris, France, collection: MOMA

Benefits of Automatic Drawing

As I mentioned, creativity isn’t a totally rational, conscious, controlled thing. You must be willing to let your subconscious take the driver’s seat – at least partially – so that you can pull out some of the surprises lurking in your brain corners.

With practice, automatic drawing is a great tool to deepen your creativity, and approach art-making in perhaps a way you aren’t used to. It’s an active form of meditation, where you quiet the mind and ease into whatever wants to present itself on the paper. This can be extremely soothing and relaxing, which will obviously benefit not only your art but your overall well-being.

A surprising side effect of automatic drawing (also called automatism) is that you may be able to unlock new ideas faster and more clearly than if you relied solely on focusing on conscious art-making. You will get more comfortable allowing the little ‘pings’ or intuition blips to come through and work themselves into your art.

How to Get Started with Automatic Drawing

As you may have deduced, practicing automated drawing is super-simple (and fun!). Here’s how to get started.

Materials

Paper – any paper will do. Whatever you have lying around. If you will be doing this regularly, you may want to dedicate a sketchbook just to your automatism practice. If you are leading a class or group in automatic drawing, I would give them white card stock or drawing paper.

Drawing utensils – again, anything you have to make marks with will work. It might be fun to switch up materials with different automatic drawing sessions; drawing pen one day, charcoal the next, pencil the next. Use whatever you enjoy using, although it may be helpful to use drawing pens that glide easily across the paper.

Automatic ink drawing by Salvador Dali, 1927, collection: MOMA

The Process

Give yourself some time and space where you won’t be disturbed or need to jump up to take care of other things. You can do this as preparation to make other art, or as a spiritual practice, or in a classroom full of kids. Obviously, tailor the mood and space to how you will be doing your automatic drawing.

1. Take a few deep breaths, shake out your arms and legs, do a little booty-shake dance – anything that helps you to be present and relaxed. Consider a guided meditation if you really want to center yourself. I use Insight Timer as my meditation app of choice.
2. Try to clear your mind and start drawing. Any marks that happen, let them flow. As in meditation, if you find your thoughts creeping in, or your brain trying to direct you, gently try to let the thoughts go. Don’t try to interpret or control the drawing.
3. Stop drawing when you feel like it.

Those are the basics! Next, we’ll explore different approaches to automatism.

Shake Things up

As I mentioned before, you can use automatic drawing effectively as a warm-up exercise. It’s similar to blind contour drawing in that you are giving up some of your control of the process. More ideas:

• Music is a super-duper way to add a whole ambiance to your drawing session. The style of music you pick will influence your drawing flow and style. Think rock music vs. meditation binaural beats. This could be fun to experiment with.
• Another idea is to do automatic drawing with other people. Try working on one piece with another person simultaneously, or pass drawings around for other people to add to!
• Start your drawing and stop part-way through to rotate the paper. Pick up again from that angle.
• Vary your marks. Start one drawing with short, jabby marks, try another one with a continuous line where you don’t pick your pen up off the page.
• Don’t look at the page while you draw. This is similar to blind contour drawing, but you aren’t focusing visually on anything to draw; simply letting your hand wander across the page.
• Try waking yourself up in the middle of the night and automatic drawing. Or if you wake naturally, it miight be fun to try this and take a look at what you’ve created the next morning.

Henri Michaux, untitled chinese ink drawing, 1961, collection: Tate

Analyzing Your Drawings

Automatic drawing can be a great method for looking for shapes, patterns, ideas for your everyday art practice. After you’ve made several drawings, look at them for anything that tends to pop up over and over.

You can also go back into your drawings and intentionally add color, shading, more drawing, etc. Automatic drawing can be a great way to quickly get some marks down to add to later.

While you are looking at your drawings, what are you feeling about them? How do you think looking at them will affect any future automatic drawings you make? Do they evoke any other responses? As you continue this practice are you finding it more easy to “drop in” and let your subconscious take over?

But What if…?

Now don’t go overthinking this, my friends. I know I keep comparing this to meditation, but truly they are very similar. The key is to approach automatic drawing as a FUN drawing game; one in which you are not invested in results.

The best part about this is that you won’t be sitting and starting at a blank page, fretting about what to draw. Automatism is not precious – let your pen fly.

If you set aside 5 minutes at the same time every day, or right before you are going to make other art, you can easily incorporate this into your repertoire of helpful art habits. You could even make it part of your morning or evening routine!

Art teachers can tack it onto the beginning of art classes to get students loosened up and ready to work.

Examples of Automatism

Hey, let’s look at some contemporary examples of automatic drawings! Just to be clear, these are not the “correct” ways to make automatic drawings. These are simply here for your perusal. Although there are similar styles to many of these, you may find yourself making completely different marks. Don’t judge or fret.

Automatic drawing warmup by Assasinmonkey on Deviant Art

A drawing created by Nat Davy while she was walking along the coast. She didn’t look down at her paper – just let her hand continue to make marks as she strolled.

Automatic art by Carol Heft, available on Saatchi.

automatic pencil drawing by Leslie White

Remember

Don’t forget as you get started, that automatic drawing is truly about the process, and not at all about what your finished drawings look like. Let that sink in for a moment; I know it’s a hard one to accept sometimes! It helps to approach this like a game or as a meditation session. Who knows, maybe you actually will discover that you have the ability to channel through your art…

I’d love to hear how your experience goes with this, even share some of your drawings if you’d like in the comments!