How literal is your dream art?

#1

People who make dream art: how close are your drawings, paintings etc. to what you actually saw in tbe dream? Do you fix things up to make them look more like they are in reality than they were in the dream?

For the normal dream challenge, i’ve made drawings that are close to what I really saw. But I find dreams to be harder to draw than real objects:

  • objects can change how they look if i look away and turn back again. There is no single answer to the question of what the object looked like
  • for real objects, i often draw shadows to show the 3D shape. It is not clear to me that my dreams have proper lighting and shadows
  • sometimes, i think the dream object was geometrically impossible (like in Escher prints)
  • my dreams are often in greyscale, or non-natural colours
#2

the few times I have done an illustration is to help describe the setting/item.

But if I was a true artist … I would found it on the dream but adjust it to make an esthetically pleasing viewing experience. Try to let the viewer see/feel the dream.

#3

Most of my dream pictures have been generic landscapes, painted with a low level of detail. When it is painted like this, it can be close to the dream in general shape and colours.

Some of the dreams have strange perspectives that can’t easily be painted. I can for example view a 3D scene through a 2D book page. This is impossible for me to paint. I also can’t paint motion well, so any dream art is limited to a “snapshot”. Some paintings have included several “frames” against the same background.

I usually don’t notice how lighting and shadows work in dreams! You have a very interesting point there, Susan_Y. I’ll try to notice that in the next LD. :cool:

#4

ive had more luck trying to sketch things from lucid dreams than nonlucid dreams because my lucid dreams are more realistic and more visual. a lot of my nonlucid dreams arent visual at all so i have to make up what it would have looked like.

i think it depends on your art goals. illustration (as a subset of art) is about communicating to others in a visual language they understand, rather than trying to accurately represent something that only exists in your head and only make sense to you. so changing things for more effective illustration makes sense. it is also a perfectly good art goal to seek a way to visually express the accurate weirdness of your own dream perception.

a lot of techniques exist to draw accurate realistic objects but it would be interesting to collect techniques that help with dream drawing. maybe cubist and surrealist techniques could help? maybe you have to invent your own?

#5

Mostly I only make drawings of my dreams in order to clear-up ideas as far as setting and layout.

I am not a very good artist, so even if I draw things in perspective, my drawings tend to be rather bland. I only draw what is necessary to understand the layout.

The rare times I have drawn actual objects, I have tried to make them as realistic to what I saw in the dream as possible. Personally, I think it is much more interesting when things resemble the strange way they looked in the dream. But that’s just me. :write: