How to Create Trippy, Psychedelic Art (2024)

Everyone has the capacity to be an artist—especially if you’re creating trippy art, which isn’t meant to make sense or be true to real life anyway. Art can be a helpful way to process and integrate past psychedelic experiences, to express yourself while on psychedelics, or to evoke the psychedelic experience with no substances at all. Here are some tips on making your own psychedelic artwork.

Trippy Art Inspiration

Prompts to spark your imagination

If you want to make trippy art but aren’t sure where to start, here are a few prompts:

  • We all have different voices in our heads: the inner critic, the inner child, the inner optimist, and more. If you could personify the voices in your head and depict them as characters, what would they look like?
  • What is an experience from your past that you have yet to process or have lingering feelings around? Draw the images that come up when you think of that experience.
  • What comes to mind when you think of heaven? Depict what your idea of heaven—or heaven on Earth—looks like.
  • What visions did you have during your last psychedelic journey? Or, if you did not have visions, what image would encapsulate the theme of the trip?
  • If you could visualize your soul, what would it look like?

Another thing you can do to get started is to put on some trippy music and allow art to flow from you as you listen. Or, find a photograph that evokes an emotion in you and draw your own abstract interpretation of it.

READ: 6 Eye-Popping Examples of Psychedelic Pop Art

Components of Psychedelic Art

If you’ve seen psychedelic art but aren’t totally sure how to recreate it, here are some of the common building blocks that you can draw from and piece together.

Bright Colors

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Seeing bright colors is a common experience within a psychedelic trip, so it’s no wonder that some of the most famous psychedelic art is colorful, from Marijke Koger-Dunham’s fantastic paintings to the music posters of the ’60s.

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Collaged Images

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Psychedelic art often includes many images and words spliced together, mirroring the whirlwind of insights that may run through someone’s mind during a trip. See, for instance, Wes Wilson’s posters. You can create art like this by cutting up periodicals or by mimicking this look with another artistic medium.

Spiritual Themes

Psychedelics—and, consequently, psychedelic art—often bring up themes of transcendence and the otherworldly. You might take some inspiration from Alex Grey, who paints angelic and extraterrestrial beings.

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A Sense of Motion and Chaos

Mimicking the non-linear logic of psychedelics, many pieces of psychedelic art contain objects in motion—sometimes too many to keep track of. Martin Sharp’s art is one example of this, particularly his poster of Jimi Hendrix playing guitar. Go wild; don’t worry if it doesn’t look realistic or make sense.

READ: The Very Best Songs to Listen to on Psychedelics

How to Create Trippy Art

You don’t need to be formally trained in the fine arts to create a trippy masterpiece.

If you want some help on the actual nitty-gritty of getting images down on the page, YouTube is always a great place to start. For example, Trippydraws has a great tutorial for creating a colorful, shroom-inspired scene; Learn From Fred has a Photoshop tutorial for those looking to get into digital art; and Doodler Sri has a more in-depth video about finding inspiration.

A few mediums to make your psychedelic art, regardless of your experience level, include:

Collage

Get a few magazines, a white board, a glue stick, and scissors, and let your imagination run wild as you cut out different images or words that speak to you and glue them on in whatever arrangement you please.

Pastels

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These are good for creating sunsets, oceans, and other scenes where colors blur together. Of course, this can include images that don’t resemble reality at all. Use the pastels to draw, and use your fingers to blend the colors together.

Watercolor

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Watercolors are also great for blending different colors together and exploring different shades of each color you use. Less water creates clearer, bolder lines, while more allows for a translucent appearance.

Line drawing

Use a pencil or pen to depict a person, animal, fantastical creature, outer space scene, or abstract shape on a piece of paper. You can also use charcoal to create different shades and shadows.

Digital art

Splice together different photos, drawings, shapes, and/or words in a program like Photoshop or the free painting program Krita. Pull up images from the internet that inspire you.

Line drawing

Use a pencil or pen to depict a person, animal, fantastical creature, outer space scene, or abstract shape on a piece of paper. You can also use charcoal to create different shades and shadows.

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How to Create Trippy, Psychedelic Art (2024)
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