Dream Theme

This is a project which I'm doing for my Digital Printmaking class. The theme that the entire class decided on (after 20 minutes of shout out things and 3 votes - no really, three. Trés. San. III.) was "dreams." This, of course, is a fairly broad, wiggly word that has a couple of connotations. Unlike, oh I don't know, "invisible." No, seriously, that's what someone shouted out for a theme. "Invisible." *SIGH*

So, after we'd settled on a fairly easy to do theme, I let my brain chug away at it for a few days. I didn't actually do any concept sketches, because frankly I'm lazy. I know that concept sketches are quite essential to art in any form, and that they are analogous to showing your work in algebra, but I'm just lazy. I'm working on that, though.

I think my first draft is a good shot and I like the direction that it's going. I want the background to be busier, but I'll have to play around in Photoshop Effects to get the feel that I want.

This was created by sketching over two images I grabbed from Google (an image of the lungs and an image of an arm from da Vinci's notebooks) in Photoshop using just a plain old oval brush. I then opened the .jpgs in Illustrator and turned the sketches into Live Paints and expanded them. Don't worry if you don't understand what I just said, I'm not even sure that I do.

After I turned my pixels into vectors, I played around with the colors of the arm (of which I'd created a reflected copy using magic alone) and the lungs. During this exploration, I decided on a pastel palette for the image. I think the softer colors work better for the "dreamy" quality I'm going for. I might play around with opacity and layering. Ooooo.

I added the thought bubble in Illustrator and colored it a really light blue, which is hard to tell on the brownish red background. Again, I think I'm going to play around with the background to give the piece more energy or something like that.

Tell me what you think!

edit: Just an extra note, the dimwits in my class decided that we should be restricted to a 2.5" x 3.5" space while working on this project. Thus the smallness of the image - any bigger and you'd see my pixels. I, personally, would have loved to do this as a postcard (3.5" x 5" according to Wikipedia). Ah well.