Dream 9

It took many years for me to create this artwork and that’s not an exaggeration. The original Dream 9 artwork was created in the summer of 2009 just as an experiment to practice my postwork techniques. It just happened to turn out so well that I kept it and developed it into a full artwork. Since it started out as just an experimental test render, there were some errors in the final work. I’ve been wanting to go back and recreate this artwork ever since 2009 but was never able to come close to anything that I loved as much as the original, until now. The most difficult part in the creation of this piece was remembering exactly how I created the original. I couldn’t find any of the original files except for one .psd which had all of the effects layers compressed so it wasn’t too helpful. I finally decided to just create a new way to postwork the artwork rather than trying to copy the original. It worked! I finally have an artwork that is better, more beautiful, and more beloved (by me at least) than the original. It only took five years of trying.

The original artwork only had the female figure as a rendered 3D model with everything else being painted on in postwork with flat 2D brushes. This time I added 3D models of stylized butterflies to the rendered scene. The error in the original that bothered me the most over the years was a weird, unnatural bend in her hair. I spent a lot of time trying to morph and paint her hair to look truly carefree and flowing. After rendering the woman and butterflies, I then desaturated the render and created a layer style to make it blend yet seem to pop-out of the background at the same time. I created the frame effect using simple inverted gradients, painted vines that I also added a layer style to, and a simple drop shadow. The last steps were to enhance the image with some texture overlays and a few Photoshop actions. It took over 30 hours straight to get it looking like this due to all the trial and error for both the render and the postwork. Time well spent, in my opinion.

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