Cadavre exquis

Start a story and I’ll complete it without knowing what you’ve written… Who as a child hasn’t played the exquisite corpse game? It’s an amusing principle that gives rise to some funny stories! It was invented by the Surrealists, mainly Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy.

The Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme defines cadavre exquis as follows: a game in which several people compose a sentence or a drawing without any of them being able to take account of the previous collaboration or collaborations.

So it was on this entertaining principle that teacher Olivia Vidil proposed an exquisite cadaver workshop to her Prépa Entertainment students, with the production of a book combining graphic style and the transformation of a person into a drawing.

SUBJECT OF THE EXERCISE

In pairs, propose an illustrated book on the theme of the metamorphosis of a character. The fictional character will be cut out 3 times and will evolve over the pages according to the theme of the exquisite corpse chosen.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE EXERCISE

• Stick to the set theme: the transformation of a character,
• Work in pairs (work as a team, coordinate ideas and production, harmonise graphic styles, distribution of tasks),
• Use of two-colour process,
• Free choice of materials: BIC, watercolour, coloured pencils, crayons, cut-out paper, etc.
• Any number of pages,
• Free format, no larger than A3,
• Book format: cover (with title and image), spine, end pages.

Educational objectives

This workshop enabled the students to learn how to work as a team and coordinate their ideas, the production and harmonisation of the defined graphic style, as well as the distribution of tasks.

The pairs had to make a personal commitment to the exercise in order to activate their creativity and trigger production. They were free to let their imaginations run wild and choose a graphic style appropriate to the story they wanted to tell.

The images had to create a strong universe using both form and content, while taking on board the constraints of the brief and building on them while respecting them. Continuity in the graphic design had to be taken into account in order to respect the visual settings of the different pages (colour, shape, composition, characters, typography, etc.).

Finally, they had to make an object, the book, so that it could be handled and functioned.

TECHNIQUE(S)

Paper, choice of materials.