NOMAD Creatives Menu
Gr. 11 Digital Dreamscape
Inspired by the work of the artists of the Surrealism period and the Psycho-analytic work of Sigmund Freud, this gallery of Digital Dreamscapes is a collection of each students’ recollection of their own dreams.
Miguel A.
I love horror, it’s one of my favorite genres. I find it such a vast and unique genre that leaves a lot up to the imagination. When I heard that this project was based on dreams and nightmares, I was instantly excited to get to work on it. As a primarily fantasy/horror manga artist and photographer, I instantly had a couple of ideas I wanted to explore with this project. At first I wanted to do something with a puppet theme or biblical angels, but had no luck turning my sketches into actual compositions.
Then I had the idea to do a series of two photos that had a similar theme and tone to them but different subjects. My first photo I called Hallowed Hallways. My sister was the eerie figure in both compositions. The first photo (the hallway one) was taken in the hallway across the room. I use editing techniques to expand its length to make it seem larger than it is, then colored the doors red to add contrast through color. All in all this one took me around 2 hours to set up the shot and then edit it.
The second photo took a bit less to create. I edited the floor by adding a completely different floor texture, added extra lighting, and also blurred in an image in the background to give the chair a more ominous look.
Mark A.
Alexandra B.
My dream was about a person standing in front of a room of mirrors, without seeing their reflection. I started the process by creating a thumbnail. I was originally considering creating the piece from a different angle (from above), but I found it impossible to find images for that. I really enjoy the colours I chose to incorporate using blend modes and adjustments and stuff. I don’t think there’s really anything I would change. Perhaps if I knew how to change the quality of the image, I would do so. Also, the mirrors aren’t 100 percent symmetrical with the angles.
Vlad C.
My Dreamscape is based on a dream I had occur a couple of times in the week following my watching of the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, a very interesting and whimsical movie.
It consists of a grand, castle-like hotel with a large, bright neon sign, that is floating above a cold, dark lake in the mountains. There is some sort of portal through the archway that leads to a carnival-like setting, and the water under the building is active, with the reflection only appearing where the whirlpool/ripple effect is taking place.
Many things I learned in class and through the tutorials were used in the creation of this project, such as the use of masking, shadowing, textures, pixel layers. Several adjustments and filters were used as well, such as HSL, brightness/contrast, shadows/highlights, gaussian blur, and the lens filter.
Overall, I am very pleased and proud of my first Media Arts project, since I put many hours of time and effort into it and ended up recreating something pretty personal into an image that has an uncanny likeness to the original depiction in my mind.
Charlotte C.
This artwork is based off of a really bad dream I had a few weeks ago. I remembered it very vividly and woke up very very scared. Usually I can wake myself up during bad dreams because I know how to lucid dream, but I had a really hard time waking myself up and when I did I kept falling back asleep. In the dream I was inside a cabin with my friend (who was really sick at that time) and I was trapped in there. It reminded me a lot of a horror movie. My favorite part of my artwork was how I merged two images together; the chairs and TV were part of another image but the background and the window were something different. I was going to base the project off of something else, but after I had this dream I immediately worked on it all in half an hour.
Gabriel D.
My world is about a cold dark desolate world devoid of any life. A concept is a man wandering around aimlessly with no idea about what is going on. My process was quite difficult as at the beginning of this assignment I had no ideas on what to make and I felt that I shouldn’t force an idea out or else the piece would not feel right. The idea came to me while I was playing this game called The Binding of Isaac where I arrived at this floor called ‘Dark Room’ which is almost identical to what I went for only at a less realistic, 2D, pixelated, top-down view.
Haighleigh F.
Allyana G.
It was the 15th of February when I had this dream. I remember having a difficult time sleeping because I was agitated by the mess of my room and overwhelmed with time. When sleep finally overtakes me, I woke up in a scenario where I was in my room full of my wrinkled clothes and bedsheets sprawled out on the floor. Puzzled about the scene unfolding in front of me, my eyes wandered around the room seeing the cabinet door opened and some more clothes peeking through the drawers. My trance was cut short when the voice of my sister echoed through the room. With a stick in her hand, she told me to get out of bed and help her capture the snake in my room. I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I remember helping my sister to look for it until she said my name barely a whisper. I faced her and she has this unreadable expression on her face. I was beginning to get confused by her, I asked her “What?” that sounded harsher than I intended. After what felt like an eternity, she finally muttered the word “Mirror.” Standing there frozen with disgust and panic written all over my face, the mirror reflected the one that I had been looking for. Its long and heavy-looking figure glides around my neck, making my skin shiver. The different patterns and shades of its muddy brown skin were stained by a burgundy fluid coming through my nose. When its face appears to the side of my own, my eyes finally shot open and fear reverb through me like a JBL Speaker. After thanking the higher power that it’s just a dream, I silently thought to myself I’m definitely cleaning my room today.
Abby G. – The Girl
This piece is about a young girl, who sees all the evil in every place she goes. She sees the devil, the demons, everything that is only imaginations to most human beings. Some people nowadays would call in hallucinating and others schizophrenic but to her, its reality. I have a very long list of relatives living and dead. On my mothers side of the family, we are a tight group of people. As a child you hear adults talking about the “old days”. I have memories of things that happened when I was a child of specific moments that most kids would not remember. I used to be able to see my grandfather when I was a child in my dreams calling to me. Creating this, I realized I wanted to make it more personal. This is my dream of seeing myself in my dream. I sometimes have dreams like this. I can see myself but not in my own body. Although I know this sounds weird but it is the way I am. I came to my final piece by trial and error. Seeing what works and what does not. It took a while to figure out what can be accomplished with this type of background, the way the photos would be placed and what types of shading I would want to go with them. If I were to go back and make changes to shading and the use of light and dark tones I would. If I were to do that, my piece could have been better. If I took more time with shading it could have possibly given more emphasis to my piece.
Rober H. – The Message
The work that I have created relates to a specific part of my dream that I managed to vividly remember. The art basically is showing myself on an old television screen trying to deliver a message through it during a war in a hidden garage, which explains why there are weapons in the art as well. If the image looks eerie or creepy, then the concept to it has been shown successfully. The eeriness interprets how the dream was odd and frightening. Since this is my dream, I was able to easily recreate what I submitted using my imagination. I first started off with gathering the images that I needed to recreate my dream. After that, I started off with placing the old TV in the garage and kept on going from there until the image was fully formed. One thing I would change is the tables’ pole to make it more visible. Although, my face on the TV looks very realistically photoshopped. All things considered, my odd dreams actually came to use for once!
Katelyn L.
My art is about a recent dream I had, where a person wakes up in an unfamiliar land with a moon-like ground and dark skies full of beasts. They’re stuck in this place, then later meet a group of people who know how to “return to the real world” – when they return, everything is abandoned. The new people explain they’re stuck between two worlds; the “fake reality”, and the “Dream World”. They need to escape and find the real reality at the end of the Dream World.
The art has many layers (around 20), and over 8 different images. I desaturated, used curves, background removal, glitch and blur effects, and blend modes. I knew I wanted the fading between the two worlds to symbolize the significance of them. What I like the most are the dragons. If I had more time I would have added more glitch effects.
Mehrshad M. – Future Earth
My artwork is about the future of earth if the governments and big corporations continue their methods. Every year, we are the witnesses of global warming and eventually It’d lead to the artwork that I’ve created. For my art work, First of all, I chose a photo from a view in the desert. I opened on my Affinity project and I erased the middle hill which was the place of the current building. Second, I started to change the background HSL in order to make it a little bit darker and red. Then I made a mask out of the HSL of the background to make the sky redder because it was so white on the original photo. I used the selecting brush tool. I added the picture of the moon, made it bigger and changed the HSL of the moon as well. Originally It was yellow but I made it whiter. I lowered the opacity and made a mask to bring back some parts of the clouds and the head of the hill. I added the modern building and changed the HSL as well. I faded the foot of the building to match it with the ground. Added the monkeys and the smoke mask and did the same. Finally, I placed the basketball and used the Motion Blur tool to fade it like It’s moving. In my dream I felt too hot and alone so I tried to design it in a way that audiences feel the same as me. I hope I was successful. If I had more time and skills, I’d use a custom brush (I think I should use a brush for this purpose) to add some waves that seem to appear near hot objects like on the surface of deserts and above fire.
Jordon M.
Marco N.
The dream I had recently involved me and my companion “Link” from the Legend of Zelda series. We had to battle monsters who invaded downtown Toronto and were wreaking havoc on buildings and citizens. Some of the monsters in my dream were almost transparent and had a lot of colours all over them so I used the noise effect to show that. I also gave it a blurry look because my dream was not too vivid. I liked the blurry effect I added to my artwork the most. At first it looked choppy and didn’t really fit the “dreamscape” feel I wanted. Adding the gaussian blur to the piece was a game changer, though. It gave it a more dreamy effect and helped blend the composites better.
Sarah P.
Cooper S. – Desk’s Dreams
This piece I’ve created represents a lot of common items I think about or dreams. The wooden desk resembles where I sit everyday and work on school, and my projects. Simply put, I enjoy drinking juice. This enjoyment is what the orange represents, and it’s a fun idea I’ll go back to often. The rest of the piece focuses on dreams I’ve had. There is one that I have been able to remember; in it, one of the legs of my bed is resting on top of a turtle. In another, the circle, moon, and square symbol are vividly written on a wall. Those two dreams gave me inspiration for adding a turtle and that sort-of code onto the black book. My process involved several days of trying to remember my sleeps, and even times where I would try to sleep for a few minutes and then wake up and go over where my brain went. They weren’t the most interesting dreams but I was able to catch a few. After that, I thought about ways to format it and decided on what I use a lot: my desk. I like the combination of items in my piece the most. You don’t often see an orange, turtle, and book next to each other on a desk. I think I managed to capture somewhat wild dreams. If given more time, I would improve the shading and touch that up. It’s a little too dark in some areas.
Jazmin T.
This work represents a recurring dream of mine that feels more like a nightmare. In this dream I am in a sky full of stars and colour, and am dropped out of the sky back into a dull reality. I am then sucked into a black hole of dark and emptiness. I believe the meaning behind this dream is that I often try to see the world through rose coloured glasses but when I come out of this fantasy, reality hits me hard. To create this work I tried to portrait this fantasy in the sky and the placement of colour and light. Reality is shown by the haunted house and dead fields to signify dullness compared to the fantasy.Overall I think this dream is about falling back into a feeling you don’t want to feel. I like the contrast between light and dark most about my piece. If I could change anything I would spend more time perfecting my masking.