Morna’s Dream

For my Dream Journal I chose to reimagine a piece of artwork that my six-year-old daughter recently created. In this painting/drawing, she drew an alien/monster among stars, swirls, ringed-planets and watercolors.

I wanted to maintain the watercolor feel of the art so after I pieced together an acceptable background, I used a Color Blendmode with rainbow sequins in order to make the clouds and sky to be overlaid with extra colors.

I didn’t like how these clouds looked together, so I inverted them to be framing the backdrop more than being a centerpiece. (Here is an image of the new cloud format with the “watercolor” effect.

Since I was creating this image based on my daughter’s work, I wanted her to be featured in it, so I found a nice pose from an image I recently took of her and inserted it. What better way to have her in this scenario than alongside her awesome alien friend in their own action pose??

Next, I inserted several features from her original painting. This project required a LOT of Masks and erasing. I also added some 3D versions of her 2D drawings to add something special to an already special piece of work. Here are some shots of my erasing and masking. I used “Select and Mask”, the Background and regular Eraser and more Masks!

After using a blue background to make differentiating lines easier, I rearranged and distorted the pieces within the image until I found what I thought was the best format. I was going to finish spot healing the sky/cloud background, but the lines in the sky seemed to make it feel even more surreal in my eyes and broke up the image/colors in a nice way, so I decided to leave them there. I hope you enjoyed my Dream Journal. I am stoked to show my daughter this very soon. 🙂