In this challenge, I chose a paragraph to interpret and image from. I chose the paragraph from J.R.R Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ which states: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it”. For me, this paragraph sparked inspiration of the recent climate crisis so I decided to create a dystopian future of the world if we ever do end up killing the Earth.

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Sketching my idea:

I first sketched my idea so I could get an idea of what I wanted to include in my composition:

Step 1:

Firstly, to create my dried up river, I had to create it myself on Photoshop as there were no dried river images on Google that I thought fit my idea. Instead I inserted an image of a river which I cut around using the lasso tool. I then got an image of a dry river bed and merged these two images together using the photo blending tool.

Step 2:

I then added an image of a dead fish to create some shocking imagery. I had to use the lasso tool to carefully cut out the background of the fish and I left the shadow from the image as I thought it created a more realistic look than adding a shadow myself.

Step 3:

I added other elements to my piece such as dead trees and fire (I used the magic wand to erase their background as they had a simple coloured background). I used tools such as the photo filter, hue/saturation and contrast to make the trees and fire more realistic and to blend in with the rest of the composition.

Step 4:

I started adding rubbish in the background to create more chaos and destruction to the piece which I also altered with the hue/saturation tools, etc. I also extended the river so that it ran through the composition and didn’t have a gap like the screenshot before. I also used the burn tool around the edges of the river bed to make it seem like it has depth and wasn’t as flat.

Final image:

To get to my final image I proceeded to add a pile of rubbish in the background and some smaller rubbish (the crisp packet and can) in the foreground to use as an angle of influence to attract the viewer’s eye. I also added in some text of the paragraph I used to interpret my image, with a simple but italic font in white to stand out from the dark image.