Childhood Dream by Karla Munger A comment from our judge... This embodies the theme perfectly. The use of character from the classic story, dreamy, reflective planet, pixie-dust, and all come together to make it clear we're looking at Neverland from space and are being greeted. I applaud the classical tie-in of story character and focus on the contest theme. It captures a great deal of the spirit of the theme in a single image - for that it is awarded 'Best Overall.'

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In creating my image, I took a cue from a description of Neverland written by J.M. Barrie himself in Peter Pan:

"...the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there...of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed."

Well, a "traditional" island just floating in space looked silly, so I decided to put *my* Neverland in a translucent globe that's permeable enough to allow comings and goings, but strong enough to contain things in a snug, compact, and nicely crammed fashion.  Inside the globe, of course, the appearance of Neverland changes. From this perspective it isn't a sphere at all -- it actually *is* an island.

Regarding the more unusual aspects of Neverland, Barrie continues:

"...there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day...and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still."

With this in mind, I made the globe's contents indistinct and slightly transparent, to hopefully afford the viewer a personal interpretation of what might actually be there.  Adding a Tinker Bell proved irresistible, and she is also a tad transparent (but less so than the globe, as she is outside of it). My inspiration for placing the globe in a trail of Tink's fairy dust came from this passage in Barrie's book:

"...Tink was flying with them, and in her light they could distinguish each other. Unfortunately she could not fly so slowly as they, so she had to go round and round them in a circle in which they moved as in a halo."

I call my creation "Childhood Dream." I made it with PSP, UIC and Flaming Pear plug-ins, and I used DAZ Studio to create Tinker Bell. Hope you like it!

Image size: 1150 x 768