Fantasy Cubed:

This was created for a 'hyper-reality' project. My intention was to create a fantasy in a cube. I wanted to modify the real world around the cube to make it look less real. The look that I finally went with was a sort of film grain look. I tried, with that look, to reverse the comparison of 'real world' to 'fantasy world,' making the fantasy more real than the reality we exist in every day. As a fan of fantasy books, movies and artwork, I wanted to demonstrate the depth of the fantasy world and the escape that it can be.

This is one of the most complicated things I have done. I started with the forest/river photo and used hue and saturation to make it very vibrant. I added a figure with blur effects over the water, with a trail behind her, running through the trees. I added a few blur and contrast effects to make it really pop, but also look dreamy, and then I chopped it up and made it into a cube with transform->skew. The hand and the background are one photo, and I simply cut out the fingers that needed to go over the edge of the cube using the magnetic lasso tool and copied them to another layer. I added a glow to the cube to give it a better 'other-worldly' look, and added a layer of hand painted dots with a soft outer glow to add to the magic.