Typography and an attempt at impressionism?

[WolfieMario]

This was for my graphics class. The project was to create an illustration(s) that looks like a word (with the illustration(s) pertaining to the word, of course).

I chose to draw six different dreams I had, spelling out the word "DREAMS". If you can't see the letters in it, look at this:

If you want to see a larger version of it, click here:

https://sites.google.com/site/wolfiemario/files/Typography-Dreams-FINALVERSION.png?attredirects=0

If it says "Your attachment is ready to download", no, it's not trying to download it. You just have to click it in order to see the image (it's 5768x1573) - Google puts that page for some computers for some reason.

My aim was to get the drawings to look like they were impressionism-style (I thought that'd be perfect since it's about dreams, which are in their own right a fleeting impression), but my biggest flaw in that respect is that I'm no good at lighting. I also kinda failed at the perspective in some of them. If anyone can give me some tutorials to help me with lighting and perspective, I'd really appreciate it. I find it funny how I have good spatial reasoning skills and know 3D graphics well, but can't do perspective right :-?

I used Adobe Photoshop CS4, and I spent almost two hours just getting the brush just right and experimenting. I spent 1-2 hours on each illustration, and some more time on the backgrounds and putting it all together. I actually have most individual objects (and their details) on separate layers, so I can easily change things if I wanted.

 

If you're interested in what the dreams are about, click the spoiler:

 

The first one is from what's probably my favorite of any dream I've had. It was this place with a large castle and an unusual garden with a floating gazebo and other floating "islands" in a pond. The pond actually connected to an ocean through a small gap, and there was thus a long peninsula with only one or two rows of trees along it, surrounded by the pond and ocean (this is unfortunately difficult to see because of the erasing I did to make it look like a "D"). It also became winter in part of the dream, so I put snow and ice in some parts. I won't bother summing up the plot (it was quite a long dream), but that should give you a good idea of what you're looking at.

 

The second one is from a brief part in a dream, where me and a friend had to board a bus, and for whatever reason, it was in the treetops of a forest. I had to take some liberties to get it to look like the letter "R", as in the actual dream the trees were mostly deciduous with only a few conifers, and I'm not even sure if that cliff was there at all (to be quite honest, I'm not even sure what, if anything we were standing on before we boarded the bus :shock:. I guess it just never occurred to me to look down :razz:).

 

The third dream... Now, that was probably inspired indirectly by when I watched my cousin play Devil May Cry 3, the two fighting dragons representing Dante and Vergil. I can't remember what colors they actually were - just that they were opposite colors, so I went with the generic black/white. I wasn't a character in this dream, I only saw it happening - it took place in this ruined city, but I wasn't able to represent the ruined buildings too well (one took long enough to draw :shock:)

 

The fourth one is from this dream where I was in this tower, where it was raining. Most of it had references to Christianity (I somehow knew the place was called "Babel"), which is interesting because I'm not religious. The illustration is of one room, which had text above it in some language I do not know, but I knew the word meant "sorrow". I chose here to use the Latin version of the word, rather than just putting some meaningless gibberish, since I don't know Latin, and it's fitting considering the Christian themes (well, this part had no Christian themes, but the rest of the dream did). When I went inside the room, I saw a statue, crying, and the sound of rain disappeared and was replaced with the sound of a girl crying. I won't give the plot of the rest of the dream as it's pretty much unrelated.

 

The fifth dream was an interesting one - I woke up in this odd palace, and I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. It's actually one of the few dreams where I imagined myself with magical abilities, and even then, I never got to use them. Apparantly, it was a magical kingdom in some warped dimension, and although most its inhabitants know magic, the magic is too weak for most people to use at all. As I was snooping around, I was getting the idea that the royal family which owns the palace is behind the fact that not everyone can use magic, but I never got to the dream's conclusion before I woke up. Anyways, of course the kingdom wasn't shaped like an "M", but that's generally how it would have looked from above. It was on an odd cracked landmass (which I think was roughly square shaped), full of large gaps shrouded by a thick pink mist - I nearly fell down one such hole before I knew about them. There was the odd-shaped purple castle somewhere near the middle of this landmass, and the rest of the kindom was build pretty much on unprotected scaffolding around it going all the way to the edge of the landmass. There were some structures, such as benches and a fountain, on the landmass itself, but I didn't show them in the illustration.

 

The final image is from an odd dream that occured where I live (or rather, where I used to live, but I dreamt this some time before I moved). I remember earlier that day (while I was awake, that is :P) I was on this site about dreams, and read that the skies in peoples' dreams are usually spectacular. In my dreams, normally, however (particularly those occuring in real world locations), all I ever see is a featureless, overcast whitish-grey. I'm pretty sure reading that is what triggered this dream, though. In the dream, it was night, and I looked in the sky with a telescope and could see an amazing display of planets and stars - much larger than you'd ever possibly see them with a simple telescope. I realized that they all seemed too close, but thought little of it, and went to sleep (within the dream). When I woke up, my mother brought me to the Seven-Eleven a few blocks down, and I saw a massive heap of garbage and random metal objects. I looked at the pile, and it thinned as I looked higher up, but then started to grow thick again. At the skyward end of this tremendous pile of metallic trash was an entire planet - apparantly magnetic - floating above Earth by only a mile or two. In the back of my mind it felt like it was the end of the world, but I stared more in awe than fear. After that I woke up. Of course, to get this dream shaped like a letter S, I had to make the planet much smaller (it was probably smaller than our moon to begin with, but that's still too large to fit here) and add another two (I know there were more planets probably behind it in the dream anyhow).

 

 

Of course I had to change my POV for many of these dreams (except the third and fourth ones), but I have a good grasp of spatial reasoning and preposition, so it's not hard for me to picture the world zoomed out around me - particularly in dreams, so I often know things about a place I've never been to, even when I don't see it through my eyes in the dream.

 

 

Please give CC, and if you don't mind, feel free to tell me which illustration/dream is your favorite :P

[Ouchy]

What is it with you and your wall's of text? :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

[Sam]

It's a great idea, but the letters just aren't clear unless we see the image overlaid with the letters for reference.

[WolfieMario]

What is it with you and your wall's of text? :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

Well, you try recounting 6 long, vivid, distinct dreams in less than a paragraph :roll:

Whatever, spoiler'd so it doesn't detract from the work.

 

It's a great idea, but the letters just aren't clear unless we see the image overlaid with the letters for reference.

Yeah, but I couldn't reshape the dreams until they looked completely like legible letters - as it stands, I already had to change enough details. It was already pretty tricky coming up with dreams that can be represented as letters at all :razz:

I know it's not at all legible as a word unless I say it's supposed to say "DREAMS", and even then, my friends only recognize the E and A. But there was a lot of variation in the sort of projects people did - some people created an object out of words describing the object, one of my friends at this forum built letters spelling "DUNGΣON" out of things from Daemonheim in RuneScape (e.g. the letters were built of bricks, some of which had things like plants growing on them or mining rocks), and someone was lame and just took a bunch of images off Google and masked a single-font text over them, so my work wasn't the only one that detracted from the initial assignment, and my teacher didn't care :P

[SanityCore]

This is cool! I really am impressed with your ideas to make them, awesome dreams! It took me a while to notice the letters, but I can make them out. Pretty cool stuff! :D

[obfuscator]

Really cool :)

 

As others have said, most of the images need to be a little more definitive in relation to the letters they are. The only one that looks obvious is the "D and S", and even then it could be better. Great work though!