Techniques of the Unconscious

Surrealists invented a toolkit of these chance methods:

• Automatism — drawing or writing with no conscious direction, which produced André Masson's tangled, frenzied lines
• Frottage — rubbing a pencil over a textured surface to lift its grain onto paper
• Decalcomania — pressing paint between two surfaces to create random blots

Artists then read these accidental patterns the way you read shapes in clouds, developing them into pictures.

Exquisite corpse — a game where multiple artists draw parts of a figure without seeing the others' contributions — produced bizarre hybrid creatures. These techniques weren't gimmicks; they were systematic methods for accessing imagery the conscious mind would normally censor.