My project for course: Surrealist Illustration: Draw Compelling Stories

“Time Dilation”

Sleep is something very precarious for me. The slightest variation in light, temperature, humidity, and other minute factors can leave me tossing and turning for hours. Then there are the random bouts of anxiety that wake me up in the middle of the night. “I guess I’ll just be awake for the next three hours! All right!”

I felt this would be great subject matter for the course assignment, which was to produce a surreal illustration representing a conflict between myself and something in my living space.

Some comments about the illustration:

I had a number of different concepts but this one felt the most interesting, because surrealism, to me, almost requires the laws of physics being distorted. And there’s nothing quite as weird as the physics of black holes, including the “spaghettification” effect that happens as objects approach the event horizon and get stretched by gravity. The black hole distorts time and space, and I tried to portray both of those distortions in this image. Time and space both seem to break down when I’m lying awake, trying to fall back asleep.

Everything in the illustration is affected by the physics of the black hole, which is actually an alarm clock. I don’t have a traditional alarm clock like this (mine is actually part of that round lamp in the bottom of the frame) but this type of alarm clock is more iconic.

In sleepless moments, one worry I have is about how productive or energetic I’ll be the next day, or how the sleeplessness will affect my mood. I represented that worry as money getting sucked up by the black hole, because productivity is ultimately a concern about performance in the economic system.

The “stars” in the background are actually tiny pills. They aren’t sleep medication, but I do take supplements to help me sleep better. I also have to take a prescription medication for another deficiency at certain time of day, and keep that medication on my night table. So pills have a physical presence in my sleep space.

And finally I wanted to add some lost sheep, to represent the old bedtime technique of counting sheep. I don’t actually use that technique, but it does visually connect to the idea of sleeplessness. I also couldn’t let those poor sheep escape the relativistic effects of the black hole, could I?

In terms of technique, I worked entirely in Photoshop, starting from a sketch. I tried to arrange the elements in a rough "golden spiral" or "golden ratio" composition, starting from the face and spiralling around the image toward the clock. For inking, since the course focused on line art, I looked at a few references like Tintin and Moebius. It therefore seemed natural to use a Belgian Comics brush to do the inking. I then added a bit of shadow and colour highlights more in the style of a cartoon than those comics. I kept the whole thing in a 4x5 aspect ratio intended for Instagram.