Todays word is "Acorn"
Ideas for some images come easy, some take a while. This one sprung to mind almost immediately.
The idea is a riff on the Smurfs where magical creatures lived in large mushrooms. My idea was to create a world where a druid type character would live in a house made out of an acorn. I had in my head a vision of an acorn house on the left side of the screen, a druid character walking down a path from the house, and sunlight streaming thru overhead foliage.
The Location
The biggest issue I had with this concept is finding a background. I didn't really have a good idea of where to get one. This was my biggest obstacle for bringing this image to life, and the one I was most worried about locating during the hunt timeframe.
Shortly after the hunt began I went for a drive up to Mount Mitchell NC. I went for a walk down the path and found some candidates for useful backgrounds.
Neither of these were perfect, but I was armed with Photoshop, so I could create my old world by combining these two images, like this:
The Subjects
I lacked an acorn, which seems pretty important for an image based on the word "acorn", but I am armed with stock photography, so getting an acorn was easy. The acorn is actually a very small part of the image, and I am confident I could take an image of one if I had one, so this was a short cut I am happy to take.
The druid character was also tricky. Since druids wear cloaks, I decided to use an Obi Wan Kenobi character and hope it didn't look too Star Wars, and more generic druid. I shot him in my lightbox:
Crafting The Image
Now that I had the main elements, I started putting it together, first by placing the acorn into the scene.
Then I added in some bright sunlight in the background to give that "morning glow" feel.
