As I started planning my “imagined Landscape,” I thought of what places I usually daydream about and also what figures show up in my dreams often.
The Imagery of fish comes up very often, as it reflects myself and my identity within my dreams. Furthermore, I often think back to Luxembourg, its forests, and Istanbul.
Wanting to combine the different scenarios, I started playing with scale, making the fish much bigger than their surroundings and usual size, inserting cities within their mouths or making them float in the forest. However, it did not feel dreamlike to me and I wanted to play with the size of the artwork itself more, prolonging it and making it into a very wide rectangle.
Therefore, I came up with a composition that would have a more “random” feel, giving it the aspect of a dream and the weirdness that happens within my head. Thus, I incorporated fish and a frog that would extend into the foreground of the work, as I jump from the fish’s mouth into my own, showing a passage from the dream world to the real and creating an effect of traveling between them. Additionally, to achieve an effect of the forest, I decided to play with texture and make a wood-like pattern that extends from one side of the page to the other, wrapping itself around Istanbul and Shibuya in Japan.
Experimenting with scale and perspective, I created a Imagined Landscape that encapsulates my identity and my origins within a piece.
Finally, to complete the “dream-like” effect, I decided to color my piece digitally, giving it a watercolor effect that would be less bright and foggy, as if I were trying to remember the dream itself.