Brief One: Dreams and Nightmares

For our first brief, we were asked to create a piece based on a dream or nightmare that we have had within our lifetime. For my own piece, I decided to create an image based on my fear of spiders, showing how they influence my nightmares.

 To begin with, I began to create a few thumbnails and sketches based on images we had been given to help inspire me for my final image. Then, after deciding on which thumbnail sketch I was going to use I then began to use the image of a hollow human eye from this collection of medical imagery as the base for my image.

Once I had cut out the eye image that I wanted I then started to use cut out images of spiders around the image both within and outside the eye to bring out the overall fear within the image. Then changing the background colour to a dark red for emphasis on the feeling of danger then increasing this by changing the levels of the main spider in the center of the image to a higher contrast making the spider stand out as the main center of the image as well as the overall eye itself.

By the end of the session, I was happy with the final outcome of my image and believe it captured my original design and meaning behind it. As someone that isn't confident using Photoshop, I originally felt very hesitant towards the task, but as the session progressed I felt a lot more confident after going through things step by step for each process. I found that the eye centers the image perfectly with the spider replacing the iris, as well as this I found that the spider overlapping the eye and how it is dark against the rest of the image brings a bolder aspect to the piece. Although I am happy with the outcome of the image I also think that looking back I could have developed this even more by doing something more with the background of this image like adding more spiders in a repetitive pattern but very faded in the background to bring out the center piece and make the image feel less bare.