These exquisite corpses we made at dinner gave me the idea to write about my favorite drawing game.
How to draw an exquisite corpse
One of my all-time favorite drawing games with my kids is called Exquisite Corpse.
Put simply: two or more people draw a head/torso/legs without looking at each other’s drawings.
We made a silly video to show you how its done:
It’s probably worth pointing out that Exquisite Corpse actually started out with the Surrealist writers, as a kind of proto-MadLib such as:
The [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] the [adjective] [noun].
This is where the name “Exquisite Corpse” came from:
Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.)
It’s fun because it’s a cooperative game, not a competitive one.
I’m now thinking it would be fairly easy to do an musical Exquisite Corpse in GarageBand: you’d pick a tempo and a key, one person could make a beat, then the next person could make a bassline without listening to the beat, and the next person could make a melody without listening to either. Then you could play it back and see what it sounds like. (I’m going to try this and I’ll let you know how it goes!)
Exquisite corpse
Above are three “exquisite corpse” drawings my boys and I made this afternoon. (Top: Jules, 5; middle: Owen, 7; bottom: me, 37.) Exquisite Corpse was a game invented by the Surrealists:
Participants play by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folded to hide each individual contribution. The first player adds a head—then, without knowing what that head looks like, the next artist adds a torso, and so on. In this way, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature is born.
Today went more smoothly and resulted in more inspiring results than last week’s session, which, if I remember correctly, ended in tears. One problem is that we swapped which body parts each drawer was responsible for each time, which I think was confusing:
I’m trying really hard to get the boys to be more improvisational with their play together, particularly the 7-year-old, who tends to art direct everyone and to fly off the handle when things progress in a way that doesn’t align with his vision. (I’m not a particularly good collaborator myself, come to think of it.)
We got a good tip from this video: draw the neck and the legs slightly over the fold so the next person knows where to begin.
Update: we made a goofy video to show how it’s done!