Tel'aran'rhiod Dreamscape by @Jansu (Brandon Ballenger)

Well, I've been rereading the WoT series lately, and a few months ago I happened to take a photo of this plaza parking lot, and as you may or may not know, my mind draws strange parallels...

There are scenes in the first book (Eye of the World) which describe one of the main characters in this bizarre dream world where danger is very real, and what happens in the dream world is reflected in the waking world. This world is later expounded upon and in fact, in just reading the first book, you would have no idea that it is the same place later referred to in the series. But anyways. The particular location is described as having windows through which the character can see into a twisted horizon, where red and orange clouds race by at high speeds. So I took that particular location in Tel'aran'rhiod, a photo of a plaza parking lot, and transformed it into a free-floating hall in that location.

The original photo may be viewed in my biography, if you want to see how I went about creating it. I cropped out the bottom of the photo and ended up extending it somewhat to the right, by the end. First thing I did was erase the background of the image, which wasn't as much of a pain as you might think. I did happen to miss a palm tree, if you study the finished image closesly, heh. Oh well, an extra column!

Then I filled that in with my bizarre clouds, and set about creating my floor. Making a level floor was a nuisance, because in the original photo it certain isn't level. There are parking slabs and little bushes and what have you, which had to be erased and then I had to cover over that with the bottom of the bushes.

After that I did all the archways, darkened the wood, added all the hanging vines to add to the floating garden look. Also ended up adding in a column myself, the sixth one down on the left, and wreathed it in foliage.

Then I decided I wanted it to wrap around, that perhaps this should be a garden maze of sorts, so I sent it off to the right in both the background and the foreground. In the foreground this entailed adding the hint of another column, another archway which had to be more convincing than the others since it was closer, and the bushes to accompany it below. They look nothing like the rest of the bushes, but if you're not paying attention, I do think they blend right in. ^_^ And then I also changed the color of the whole thing to suit the lighting from outside, and added the shadow figures. The one in the center is stalking the other, of course - Ba'alzamon stalking Rand, perhaps - with the other peeking out around the corner of a column.

I had a lot of fun with this, and I really like the result. It was a fun process, making a dream out of reality, and I might do more things like this in the future.