DOZING OFF

 

(HB pencil on 115mm x 80mm paper)

A dreamscape piece which seems to focus more on the dream construct around the the character who appears to be dropping off to sleep. Everything takes a fluid, and metamorphic, aspect before a dream finally takes shape.

The Clueless Wizard

 

(2B pencil on 110mm x 81mm paper)

An odd dreamscape piece which produced the unlikely pair of characters of a wizard and, what looks like, a rocker, with the wizard having trouble deciphering a magic scroll he's been given. The rocker doesn't look too impressed!

The Book of Magic & Mayhem

 

(HB pencil on 110mm x 78mm paper)

Odd characters and weird objects do tend to come to the fore when doing dreamscape pieces. This elf-like wizard, with even stranger looking ears than normal, reading a chaotic looking book of magic, is no exception.

Screaming Soul

(HB pencil on 182mm x 129mm card

- NOT AVAILABLE -

With this particular dreamscape piece, I did something a little different. I started with a simple sketch of a screaming face and worked around it to produce the work above. The image itself is slightly wider, with the screaming face being more central. I wanted it to be more complementary to the distorted female figure which developed during the Rorschaching stage, so I cropped the image with photo-editing software.

Star-Keeper

(HB pencil on 120mm x 100mm paper)

- NOT AVAILABLE -

Another dreamscape work where a planetary theme seemed to develop with the glowing orb and the line of spheres near the leaning figure. "Star-Keeper" was then an obvious choice for the title of it.

Waiting For Something To Happen

 

(H pencil on a 139mm x 87mm postcard)

- NOT AVAILABLE -

A dreanscape work completed with a H grade pencil. The woman appeared early on in the Rorschaching stage, but the rest of the image remained dream construct.

Dreamscape - Speed Tests

"Sleeping Beauty" (HB pencil on 63mm x 35mm card)

 

For the past few weeks, I've been working towards producing a short video on the Dreamscaping technique of automatic drawing (surrealist automatism). I realised that I couldn't do these at the current scale that I usually do them, which is near postcard size, as that would take far too long. So I needed a more acceptable size that I could view with the limited videoing equipment that I have, which is just the video function on my compact camera. In the end, I opted for 63mm x 35mm. The reason it's so specific is because I simply used a piece of off-cut card which looked the right size and drew around it as a template.

 

Before any video could be made, I had to time myself doing a piece this size. The first one was "Sleeping Beauty" shown above, but even at that size, I found myself getting carried away with it and forgetting the time limitations I needed for it. In the end, it took 1 hour, ten minutes to do. It's a good little piece, showing the remnants of a broken-down android forever staring at another amongst all the other refuse, but the time it took was way over the 30 minute limit I had in mind for them, so the work had to be more sketchy.

 

Now, a quick sketch is easy to do. A few minutes is all it would take. The internet is filled with videos of people doing just that, but the Dreamscape technique I use takes just a little more time.

 

"Elven Harassment" (HB pencil on 63mm x 35mm card)

 

"Elven Harassment" is more of a sketch in quality, but does its job, as it took 28 minutes to do. I've no idea what's going on in that image, but I do like the fact that the elf looks as if she's about to punch him. The final video I'll be making, obviously, won't be around that timeframe. It will be sped-up to around 3 minutes, but should clearly show the techniques used and the randomness of the image produced.

 

It's still a work in progress....

 

The Wizard's Cloak

(B grade pencil on 125mm x 75mm notecard)

- NOT AVAILABLE -

With this dreamscape image, there were fewer highlighted areas to it, with the rest shaded into the background as dream construct.

They were curious choices to make, considering all the other shaded forms, but that simple central focal-point of the floating piece of paper does seem to balance the kneeling figure on the right quite well, so little else was needed.

Hello & Goodbye

(HB pencil on a 139mm x 89mm postcard)

- NOT AVAILABLE -

These dreamscape pieces do tend to become very chaotic in nature. I have no control over that as I build up the shading and the imagery is revealed. The title was obviously taken from the words and symbols which I added at the end. Before that, I was thinking of a title based around the head in the bottom right hand corner which looks as if it's being inflated (or deflated), causing this mass of object memories to be sucked out of it. "The Final Download" being one which I was considering. But I liked "Hello & Goodbye" more.

FAP 4 MCAW

(Black biro on a 139mm x 89mm postcard)

I was going to call this piece "bloodlines" due to the darker area within it, but as I shaded and over-shaded it, using the same techniques as in previous works, I found that the lettering in the bottom left began to take shape. It meant that it could have no other title, so I highlighted those words. But those bloodline areas themselves do help to break up the chaotic nature of it and give it more shape.

MORPHINIA - Mistress Of Dreams

(2B pencil on a 139mm x 89mm postcard)

  - NOT AVAILABLE -

I used the same techniques of shading and overshading, as I did in the last dreamscape work that I did. The shapes that stood out early on were that of the woman under the blanket. She's clearly out of proportion, and I did nothing to correct that, opting to simply let the image take its own form. The same goes for all the other shapes within the piece. It's normal for faces to appear in such work, as we're naturally conditioned to recognise them and therefore tend to see them more in patterns.

Rubbish Bin Of The Mind

(Black biro on a 139mm x 89mm postcard)



In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with a form of random drawing based on the way dreams start to form as you fall asleep. Some melt into full view, some can be like small screens that appear which grow larger, whilst others can take form from the cellular shapes you see when you close your eyes.

It's some of these aspects that I've been trying to transfer into my artwork. I found the most effective way to do that was to lightly shade the area and then overshade, time and again to allow shapes to randomly form, then try and make sense of them in a kind of self-imposed Rorschach Test. Sometimes turning the card this way and that until some kind of basis for the artwork establishes itself. The first of these that you see above was done with a biro, and the nature of the shading for it seemed to dominate the boxy shapes which formed.

Some would call the style Surrealist Automatism, and it's a perfect example of it which isn't as doubtful as others in the genre. But I prefer to call it "Dreamscaping" to separate it from that doubt, and also because I think it's a better name for it. I've drawn transmorphic images before, but they've been based on specific themes which I've started with, whereas these have none with no idea how they're going to turn out. This certainly makes them ideal as skav artworks, even if they do take much longer to complete.