Introductory activities, Ongoing engagement

Surrealist Free Drawing Introductions

Creative take on doing intros that can help students to know one another and challenges perfection paralysis.

Click on the CC icon in the bottom right corner of the video to turn on closed captions.

With Autumm Caines

Educator prep: None

Student prep: None

Synchronous

Paper / pens

Duration: 5-30 mins

Activity purpose

Creative take on doing intros that can help students to know one another and challenges perfection paralysis.

Useful for

Building community online, recognizing different ways of knowing and creating, kicking off a creative project.

Preparation

Ask participants to bring paper and pen(cil).
Decide which constraint(s) you will give.

Instructions

Start with a short description of free drawing and be very clear that this is about looking at things from a different perspective - we are not going for perfect portraits. You can give examples from surrealist automatism and surrealist techniques. You may also want to share examples of surrealist portraiture but note that those examples are often more polished than what would be expected in this exercise.

Share your screen with visual examples of these and draw conceptual connections to free writing, as many may be familiar with this. The surrealists were known for using a variety of methods and techniques to get their results; so next, you will describe a technique for your participants to use in their portrait drawing. Techniques often introduce some element of constraint to the process. You can use one technique or layer techniques together. Some ideas for techniques can include:

A short time limit
Drawing with your non-dominant hand
Drawing without lifting your pen/pencil
Drawing with your eyes closed

Next, decide how your participants/students/artists will be divided by pairing people up, grouping them off, or having them do self-portraits. If the group is very large you may consider using break-out rooms.

After having completed the drawing, have participants share their portraits of one another by holding their drawing up to the camera and talking about their process. This can be done during the session so that real-time reactions from the participants can be captured, afterward in a discussion board/semisynchronous space like a Slack or Discord chat, or in a hybrid format where some are shared in real-time and some are shared afterward.

Duration

Surrealist demo: 3-5min
Drawing time: 1-5min
Report out: 0-15min

Estimated total time 4-25min

Time for this activity can vary depending on the size of the group; if time is used as one of the constraints; if the debrief is done in the session or online afterward.

Adaptations and examples

Instead of just doing this as a one-off activity to get to know one another consider doing it at the beginning of every class. Mixing up partners and using different techniques each time.
If one/some student(s) do not have a camera
- If there are a large number of students with this limitation consider self-portraits
- Have all students shut their camera’s off and draw one another based on descriptions that they give to one another
- Have students who are partnered with someone who do not have a camera draw symbolic representations of the person’s name
- Have the student who does not have a camera put a picture in their profile which will show instead of the camera
- To share the image that they draw have students without a camera
  - Take a picture of their drawing and share the drawing in the chat
  - Describe their drawing and share it later in a discussion board or in a semisynchronous chat space.