Favorite ways to depict hallucinations?

[dylangandune]

just wondering how various folk tackle things like this...

do you make funny panel borders?

different speech bubbles?

etc. etc?

[scullpanda]

wobbly lines for borders and kind of a spinny atmosphere

[phen]

This is a really fun concept to experiment with -- you can alter frames and speech bubbles depending on your hallucination's mood. You can also influence the viewers' perspective of the character depending on the pov -- blurry backgrounds, overlapping lines, opacity of form and figure, and angle shifts.

If you're working in colour, inverting from the normal scale or placing a solid, unnatural filter-hue over the scene can infer a sort of hallucination vibe.

[indagold]

I usually do a ton of research looking at articles or drawings before adding them to get an idea of what they are. It certainly is fun because you get to draw some weird ass stuff readers would probably never see before. I also use closed eye hallucinations and sleep paralysis since I suffer both as an effect. I basically just find a grain filter and edit the brightness and boom you got the same thing.

Hallucinations are weird. They can vary from this:

to this:

besides visual there is audatory (voices, humming), sensory(biting, cuts), Olfactory (burning smell, rotting), etc.

[dylangandune]

awesome replies...thank you so much...
I like the idea of also making the hallucinated scene imbedded in the person's eys, or on their head....

[AnnaLandin]

My main character occasionally has a wobbly grip on reality. In his case it's less hallucinatory and more magical rage-y, but I tend to depict it using wobbly or uneven panel borders, by filling the gutters between panels with blobs of colour and weirdness, and by blurring certain effects around him. The different speech-bubbles is a neat idea, too, though not something I've used myself.

I would suggest colour-coding as a powerful tool as well - if the "real world" of your comic is coloured in a bunch of warm, orange-y tones, you could colour the hallucination in shades of blue and green to make it look immediately different than the surrounding panels.

[AliceHoffmannArt]

Other than visual effects that were already mentioned, if the hallucination is supposed to trick the reader into thinking it's real (like it it may seem for the character) and is thus treated like "normal scenes", I like that too. It makes you second guess a lot of scenes after a while if it's established soon enough. Brr.

[punkarsenic]

i mean, it depends on the hallucinations? if its like, a worrying, full on psychotic break, thatd prolly require looser lines and saturated, slightly off colours, prolly higher contrast.

but then, sometimes people just have mundane hallucinations quite often. like, sometimes theres jus a dragon on the sofa. nbd. whatever. so then i guess id keep everything normal, but the hallucination itself would have some kinda alteration to show the reader that its a hallucination.

like, my main character experiences hallucinations, but theres also magic in their universe - im not doing anything special to make it particularly clear what is and isnt a hallucination, because i dont want it to be clear. its entirely unclear whats magic and whats just their mind.

[spadesart]

not really a "hallucination" but i really liked how Chromedome reading a dead body's memories in More Than Meets The Eye was depicted

[El_Psy_Congroo]

A lot of the characters in tokyo ghoul are pretty messed up haha so the psychological state of the characters is often reflected in the art of the comic itself. One example is that the main character's inner world often has a checker board pattern. This has a lot of symbolism because of an event of great significance that takes place earlier; where he is chained to a chair in a room with a checkered patterned floor. (the first image isn't that scene but a hallucination - although it clearly draws a parallel.)

Another example, is that when a character who is known as an unbeatable warrior has a scene, he is often depicted with hyacinth orchids in the background, sometimes even growing out of the floor when they shouldn't be. Its a cool symbolic effect although I don't know what it means haha