Let's Make a Tiny Surrealist Book

What would Dalí do?

I had some chipboard and paper scraps sitting on my desk so I cut them up and made a tiny blank book. I felt some pressure to come up with a really good idea for what to fill it with, so it sat around on my desk for a few weeks. I haven’t really painted or drawn at all for a few weeks. Fear of failure has taken over my brain, whispering things like “what if I make something bad” or “what if I mess it up” or “I don’t even know what I would make.”

The prescription for such thoughts is to just start. It feels a lot like cold plunging; thinking about jumping into the unknown of a project is a lot more painful than actually jumping in. Something that helps me ease into making things when I’m afraid of failure is starting with a pressure-free warmup. Surrealist techniques make for great warmups because they encourage under-thinking and under-planning. Surrealist Salvador Dalí said, "what I want to show in my images is the beauty of failure."

Surrealism leverages production techniques like automatism and the element of surprise to explore the subconscious mind. This often results in dreamlike and illogical imagery. When I’m overthinking my work, it’s comforting to remember that I can turn down my rational brain, lean into the process, and call it surrealism if nothing else.

I applied surrealist thinking to fill my blank book. The tiny blank book makes for a perfect canvas because if somehow I mess it up I can easily make a new one. Or, even better, I can try to mess it up and see what happens. The book format is different than a blank piece of paper because you can put facing images in conversation with each other, create relationships between groups of words and pictures, and play with narrative and time. It’s interactive. It’s tiny. What more could you ask for?

How to make a tiny surrealist book:

1. Grab a few scraps of paper and cut them into a rectangle. Fold the rectangle in half. Boom! You’ve got a book. You could find a thicker piece of paper or cardboard to make a cover, too.

2. Glue or staple the pages together at their crease.

3. Without thinking too hard, choose the medium you’ll use to fill the book. Perhaps you’ll fill it with paintings, drawings, a short story, or tape in natural specimens. Maybe you want to warm up with a medium you’re used to, or maybe you want to explore a new medium.

4. You could also play with process patterns. For example, I painted alternating pages first, then came back in and wrote the first sentence that came to mind on the opposite page. This process resulted in a strange, nonsensical story that is open to interpretation. Typically, images illustrate words in a book. In this case, words illustrate images.

5. I’d suggest filling the pages quickly if you’re doing this as a warmup. This way your brain won’t have time to interject with doubt or criticism. The point is to just make something, not make a masterpiece. I made this book in about 15 minutes. I don’t think any publishers will come knocking at my door about it, but maybe a mouse will pick it up in the middle of the night while I’m sleeping.

A tiny book calls for a tiny palette. I wanted to make this FAST and keep it light and fun, so I grabbed the first piece of paper I saw and used it as a palette. This made cleanup easy and the palette became its own work of art.

What do your art warmups look like? How do you get yourself to jump into making something when you’re afraid to mess up? And if you give this exercise a try, I would LOVE to see pictures/videos! Let me know in the comments!

Thank you to everyone who is chiming in on the subscriber chat! It’s great getting to know you and learning about what you think about and make. Some things that stuck with me from last week’s chat:

• Alluminator shared their incredible astrophotography

• Col shared about their home permaculture projects and I learned what berms and swales are

• Rosie Whinray shared about how living conditions affect productivity, I love their essay on this topic

• Richa Riddering introduced the idea of “eating the big ugly frog,” or tackling the task you’re most likely to procrastinate, but only once a day

This post is part of my “Let’s Make Something” series, which I publish every Friday. You can browse the full series here.