An Unexpected Journey

Behind the Scenes: Crafting the Nocturnal Journey Print

The Finished Nocturnal Journey Print

There’s a moment in every project where the work begins to take on a life of its own—where your original vision steps aside and something far more unexpected emerges. Nocturnal Journey, the print I created for the Dina Dress in Lovelorn July’s first drop, Midnight Minou, is one of those pieces for me. What started as a series of soft, almost romantic watercolour motifs slowly transformed into something dreamlike, hazy, and strangely otherworldly—something that felt exactly like the lucid, midnight-wandering state I wanted to evoke.

It Began With a Cat and a Flower (or Twenty)

The earliest sketches were simple: loose floral arrangements and little nocturnal cats, all painted with watercolours in soft washes. I was exploring that delicate line between whimsy and melancholy—botanical gestures for softness, feline silhouettes for a quiet sense of mischief. Each motif was painted by hand, layer after layer of diluted pigment, letting the colours pool, drift, and dry in unexpected ways.

I love this part of the process—the ritual of mixing colours on a palette, the unpredictable textures of water on paper, the sensation of building a print element by element with my own hands. It feels grounding and nostalgic in a way digital work rarely does on its own.

A Digital Detour

Once I had a small archive of motifs, I scanned them and moved into Photoshop. This is where everything shifted. My initial plan was to refine the placement, adjust the colours, and composite the elements into something airy and detailed. Instead, in a moment of curiosity (and maybe artistic rebellion), I tried applying a soft blur to one of the flowers.

It changed everything.

The motif instantly felt like a half-remembered dream—recognisable but untouchable. I began blurring the cats, the petals, the stems, toggling between clarity and fog. The print transformed into an atmosphere rather than an illustration. It drifted away from what I originally imagined and into something that felt like a hazy midnight memory—a visual echo instead of a literal representation.

Leaning Into the Lucid Dream

This decision to blur the motifs ended up guiding the entire aesthetic of Nocturnal Journey. It aligned perfectly with the emotional direction of Midnight Minou: the softness of late-night thoughts, the weightlessness of wandering minds, the way familiar shapes become something new in the dark.

The final print feels almost like it’s moving—flowers blooming and dissolving, cats slipping in and out of view. It’s less about what you see and more about what you feel you saw.

An Unexpected Path Worth Taking

Creating this print reminded me of something important in my own practice: the magic often happens when I loosen my grip on the outcome. I began the process painting tiny, precise florals and cats—and ended up forging an abstract, lucid-dream world that feels far more aligned with my creative intuition.

Sometimes the work tells you what it wants to be.

Sometimes you just have to listen.