“Cloud House”

„Surrealism almost always uses contrasting color tones to bring out the literary contrast between the clashing ideas of reality and hallucination. The narrative is interspersed with dream-like sequences that revel in Surrealism in all its glory.” 

―  Screengobblr

The original sketch

The thematic template was my Dreamer image, of the house on a cloud, which was also the subject of this work.

At the very beginning, as always, there was a sketch, which I make directly in the editing programme in order to orientate myself a little. It only serves to visualise the plan I have in my head and is not meant to be a work of art. I added the foreground to the original drawing because I wanted to convert the image to a vertical format and added some things.

Matching pictures

The first thing I did was to look for a suitable cloud. As always, I used unsplash for my images. All the images I used are linked below when you click on them.
I made sure that the light side of the house was clearly separated from the shady side, because I wanted to have a moon shining from one direction. Little by little, the sky, moon and many small additions were added. I looked for an extra picture for the windows because they looked too lifeless in one colour. The picture came together and I was happy with how it looked.

Colors and atmosphere

Then it was a process of adjusting the colours to create an atmosphere. For the original image I chose a pink gradient for the picture, which I left out here to make the night look even darker. I used a lot of colour gradients to direct the light of the moon properly, from the top right corner (light) to the bottom left (dark). I also adjusted the blue tone of the sky and the reflections from the light inside the house on the cloud. The shadow from the tree & the foreground were still missing, which I added at the end and adjusted in colour. Then the picture was finished and I was happy.