In the style of Jean Dubuffet

You need:

1. drawing sheet A4 size


2. pencil


3. thick markers in red, blue and black


4. fine markers in red, blue and black

Jean Dubuffet (France, 1901-1985) was a French painter and sculptor. He was very interested in drawings of children and mentally disabled. He called those drawings Art Brut (raw art):art produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. Dubuffet sought to create an art as free from intellectual concerns as Art Brut, and his work often appears primitive and child-like.

Many of Dubuffet's works are painted in oil paint, thickened by materials such as sand and straw, giving the work an unusually textured surface. During the early 1960s, Dubuffet produced a series of paintings in which he limited himself to the colours red, white, black, and blue. Those works resemble jigsaw puzzles, such as Nunc Stans (Guggenheim Museum, New York), in which tiny, obscure, closely spaced figures and faces dominate.

Towards the end of the 1960s he turned increasingly to sculpture, producing works in polystyrene which he then painted with vinyl colour paint.



Look at artwork of Dubuffet, especially Allées et venues. Discuss the salient features: colours (mostly red, blue, white, black), recognizable and unrecognizable shapes, curved lines, hatched areas and the whole sheet is full.

Doodling wavy lines

Students fill their sheet with wavy crossing lines, using a pencil. Then they search human or animal figures in those lines. Trace these figures with a black marker. Colour the patches of these figures in red, blue, hatched red and hatched blue. Leave some patches white. Outline the figures with a wide black marker. Trace de remaining lines between the figures with a fine black marker.

Made by a student of grade 6