My idea actually came from a quote by Ariel Dorfman, a Latin novelist and playwright, who said, “We can live with lots of things, but we can't live without imagination, we can't live without hope.”

 

I thought of a child growing up in a bad neighborhood, and using his imagination to dream up a beautiful paradise. I pictured a run-down building, and using one of the windows as a view into the boy's imagination.

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The most difficult part of the composition was the light flowing from the window down to the boy. I created a new layer, and then made a selection with the Polygonal Lasso Tool. I filled it with white, then feathered the selection, but it still didn't look right. So, while on the masking layer, I used the eraser tool, but at 48% opacity, and 48% flow. I just used it on the edges of the sun ray so it wouldn't look so harsh. Finally, I got it to look the way I wanted it to look.

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The images are from Google Creative Commons. Some other tools and effects I used were the cloning tool, blurring, color replacement, and hue adjustment.