This first image I am using for the water in my dream. I used the spot healing brush to get rid of the reflections in the water of the clouds.
I then added houses that would be used as the shoreline. I used the spot healing, healing, and clone stamp tools to blend the sky and water from the house picture with the original water picture.
Next I added the bridge. I used the quick select tool and the eraser to cut out the background from the original bridge picture. This part took awhile because there were a lot of small openings in the bridge where I had to get rid of the background.
For the focus of my dream, I added 2 people, one person on a boogie board and one person drowning. I used quick selection and the eraser to cut the people out from the original pictures. To blend the water of the person drowning and the background, I used spot healing and the clone stamp so it was the same water/background throughout.
I found a tutorial online to add realistic water ripples so the water wasn’t just flat. This involved adding a new layer then applying a bunch of filters. First I did clouds to get the texture then used other filters like radial blur, bas relief, chrome, and gaussian blur to make it look like water. I changed the blend mode later on (not in this screen shot) to linear light just because I liked the way it looked better.
I found water splash brushes online which I downloaded to make it more dramatic and disrupted by the people. I changed the size and angle of the brushes to make it look more messy and realistic.
Finally I just added some editing layers to make all the layers look cohesive and make the piece look less patchy. I used levels, hue/saturation, photo filter, and brightness/contrast. I just messed around with them until I got the effect I wanted.
Usually I do not remember my dreams but this one really stuck with me for some reason. My dream took place in my hometown so it was easy to recreate the scenery and background because I was able to visualize it so easily. The dream started out with me and my friend walking to class, in high school. For some reason I really wanted my hair to have beach waves so I jumped off the bridge into the water. This jump started the main part of the dream which scared me so I woke up.
The main part of the dream is me drowning. My friend was boogie boarding around me and I was so mad because at first he was not saving me. He then tried to save me and I could not get up on the boogie board and was so frustrated. I kept going in and out of the water and I could not catch my breath. That is why I chose to put a person partially submerged with a hand coming out to emphasize the struggle that I was having in the water. I added the splashes to make sure I showed the difficulty that I faced in my dream. It would also look very unrealistic if I had the boogie board and drowning person with the water completely flat like how it was originally. Adding the ripples and splashes really emphasized the struggle by disrupting the calm, flat, water.