How to Draw Your Dreams

As per Robot_Butler's idea - This thread will be for the general discussion of techniques for visually portraying your dreams. Anyone is welcome to offer knowledge or ask questions. :cooler:

I think digital image editing software offers amazing opportunities for creating dreamscapes. Image editing and creative collaging seems perfect for the presentation of dreams. When you look at it from the perspective of schemata, our dreams are really just a collection of stolen and reinterpreted imagery recycled from our daily lives, anyways. Why not just find that original imagery and cut and paste it together in a physical medium?

In addition to collaging, the freedom of being able to paint using nondestructive techniques allows you to undo and redo as many times as you need so you can create freely. We no longer have to plan out our drawings and paintings beforehand. The old surrealist ideas about automatic and spontaneous painting from the subconscious can become a reality thanks to our technology.

I am not really an expert on this stuff, but I do love it. I've always worked with fingerpaints and charcoal because I like the direct physical connection to the paper. I like to feel what I am doing (and get messy). While I've always used some digital imaging for work, I've only recently switched over to working all digital.

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Originally Posted by Robot_Butler

When you look at it from the perspective of schemata, our dreams are really just a collection of stolen and reinterpreted imagery recycled from our daily lives, anyways. Why not just find that original imagery and cut and paste it together in a physical medium?

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I agree. And it's something that's becoming more and more apparent, the more I do these sort of digital collages I've been doing. They look strange, in that some of the objects just look so out of place together, or in wanton twists of perspective, but it definitely gives it that more surrealistic look. I've never actually gotten into collages before - other than a few I did back in school, on paper - but I'm really enjoying putting these random images together to make dream scenes and smooth them into a single image. I'm working on another dream right now. :D

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Originally Posted by Oneironaut

I added some images to the OP. I had a bit of an idea that I'm going to start trying out: Instead of taking the time to draw or render scenes from my dreams, from scratch, I'm going to do some photo manipulations in PS. It's a lot more true to my original visions than just choosing standard pics off the net, and it's a lot less time consuming than drawing the scenes myself. The good thing is, though, that I can position objects and people in ways that are more close to how I actually see them, in the dream.

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Where do you find most of your images? Do you just do a google image search with key words?

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Originally Posted by Robot_Butler

Where do you find most of your images? Do you just do a google image search with key words?

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Primarily, yes. But for certain images, I'll paste in images from my personal photographs to do places like my own house and whatnot. Also, if there is a certain something I'm looking for, I might take a still from one of the movies on my hard drive, and cut out a body or an object or something. So far, I've been finding most of what I need on google, but searching for the perfect pose/position of a person or object can be pretty time consuming, in itself.

Figured I would post an example of the types of "collage" images we are talking about, so here is one of my illustrated dream journal entries:

http://www.dreamviews.com/community/...771#post188771

Epic Bump.

I just wanted to update this, because of a tool I recently found, that might make it easier for some of you to start drawing or photo-manipulating your dreams. It's a lot like Photoshop, for those of you who may not have access to Photoshop, but it's completely web-based, so you don't have to download any software or anything. I've been messing around with it while at work, and it's pretty slick.

Photo editor online - Pixlr.com edit image

Take a shot at it, and Have Fun!!

(Also, the Draw Your Dreams thread has gotten pretty stale, lately. Let's Pick It Back Up!! Hopefully I will be throwing a few more pictures up there, sometime soon. :>)

Pixlr is indeed the shit.