Automatism 1 & 2 I set out some constraints for myself here: no panel was to take more than 5 minutes to draw; I wasn’t allowed to think about the content of a panel until I started to draw it; and I was to take my pen off the paper as seldom as possible (this last constraint was ditched after about three pages). As the title suggests, I was influenced primarily by the Automatistes, a Québécois abstract movement that slightly predated the Abstract Expressionists. Borduas, Riopelle, Leduc, et. al. propounded a sort of stream-of-consciousness form of abstraction that was built on the Dada and Surrealist movements in Europe. This sort of “Automatic Drawing” has been done better by other cartoonists long before this (Chester Brown’s Ed the Happy Clown being perhaps the most famous example), but I think that it’s a useful tool to linber up one’s drawing style and to overcome writers’ block Drawn October 2006. WANT TO BUY THIS? click here