This image is a recreation of a dream that I had when I was much younger. In it, there were two apples that, for some reason, my sisters and I needed to protect at all costs. Later on in the dream, we decided to eat the apples and discovered that the reason we had to protect them was because instead of cores, the apples had strawberries in the middle. After that, we ate the apples around the strawberry part and used the strawberries as light bulbs for our house.
In the completed image, I tried to show a progression of the different events that occurred in the dream. There’s a regular apple on the table, and an apple with a bite revealing part of a strawberry held in someone’s hand above. Above that, there’s a strawberry hanging from a cord like a light would hang from the ceiling. The most difficult part was trying to get the images to look like they belonged together, and to do this I applied a few blended color filters in between the layers of objects.
Process:
This is the image that I used to get the whole, uneaten apple on the table.
I chose another image of an apple with a cut in it, erased the middle part, and edited it around a picture of a strawberry to look like the strawberry was inside the apple. This was pretty challenging to do, but I think it looked alright in the end.
For the background, I erased the hanging light that was originally in the photo and replaced it with an image of a different strawberry. At the same time, I added in the other images and their shadows, and played with their placement to get the composition to look better. I ended up moving the strawberry-apple up in the image to be held in a person’s hand, which I thought would make the image a bit more interesting overall.