drawing my dream

Hello! Today I am going to do something that I’ve been meaning to do for awhile: draw my dream. If you’ve ever had a dream (and remembered it) then crazy scenes are bound to be in them. For example, I’ve had a dream that my house was full of packing peanuts, and another time I had a dream that, for youth group, we were inside this dark and spooky house. Drawing your dream is a great way to get inspiration for your art.

I’m not very good at drawing buildings, landscapes, or cityscapes (I prefer still life), so I took awhile to sort through my dreams to find a scene that I think I would like painting. Before we get into the painting, let me tell you my dream (please note that this one wasn’t really my most exciting dream).

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Me and a couple other girls were in this very skinny hallway where we going to have ballet class (so skinny that if you lifted your leg side your leg wouldn’t fit). So, I moved to a balcony that had more room, but I also couldn’t see the teacher in the balcony.

I put my water bottle down on the balcony and I asked my friend if she wanted to join me in the balcony. She came into the balcony and said, “No.” So then I moved back into the very thin hallway.

THE END

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Yep, that wasn’t that exciting. When I had the dream it was exciting though.

I will be drawing the balcony scene, which has sort of an oval shaped railing, and it has luscious tropical plant overgrowth. It doesn’t go into the balcony, but it touches the railing. It also has concrete floor. I wouldn’t recommend dancing on concrete floor 😂 I’ll be adding my water bottle to the scene, but I won’t be adding myself because I don’t know how to draw humans.

First, I started by sketching. This sketch was really simple and really only took about 30 seconds. I was originally going to sketch some plants, but I decided against it because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just planned to paint them on, which I thought would have ended badly but it didn’t.

Then, I painted in the concrete floor, which ended up being a little too dark, but I can always fix that later. I also added a thin green layer behind the plants to act as blurry background plants, but this wasn’t that helpful. Compared to the deep green plants, this was basically white.

The paper warped a lot.

The leaves, once I got the hang of them, were really fun to paint. I got to mix lots of different shades of green, which was quite enjoyable. I wanted them to be quite opaque, so I added quite a bit of white, but I also didn’t want them to pastel, so I added some black, so they were quite desaturated but I actually quite like the look. I kinda just wish they were deeper greens.

We’re more than halfway done and it’s only been fifty minutes. You can probably see the saturation and opacity of the leaves go down a little bit. There’s some sort of evolution going on in the leaves. I kinda played around a bit with the leaf shape before landing on just two types: a palm sorta leaf and a “normal” leaf.

Ahhh, it’s done 😁 I really like how it turned out. It slowed down a bit near the end, so in total, I think this took around one hour and forty minutes. Let’s get onto the rail!

It took a little bit of squinting and paper-tilting to find the sketch underneath but it wasn’t completely covered! I am pretty happy with the color of the rail, but I painted it a little unevenly. The oval shape is a bit confusing: sometimes it looks like the outside of the balcony and sometimes it looks like the inside (it’s supposed to be the inside).

Also, here are some beautiful closeups.

And here’s the final piece! You might be wondering: where’s the water bottle? Well, I ended up leaving it out because there was some sort of mysterious and apocalyptic feeling of the painting, and adding the water bottle would remove that from the painting. I painted over some of the leaves to make them sit over the railing, which gives it a nice depth. But, since the rail is white the white paint mixed in with the leaves and made the leaves over the rail a whole lot more pastel. I think it looks alright though.

Overall, I really like this painting because of leafy wall and it’s very pretty. However, the vibe that the painting shows doesn’t really reflect my dream, which was supposed to be the main goal of this painting… I think this piece is more inspired by my dream than copied after my dream because all the elements in it are changed a little lot to fit my art style.

I hope you enjoyed this post a lot! I highly recommend drawing your dreams! If you want to learn how to work without reference images, but you don’t really have the creativity in the moment to think of a scene/character, have your unconscious mind do all that for you! All you have to do is draw it. (And you won’t waste your time thinking, you can multitask [i.e. sleep] while you’re thinking)

Let me know what you think about this painting! Also, I’d love to know if you ever had any crazy dreams. I love reading people’s dreams 😆 I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye!