Advanced_Photoshop_141_-_2015_UK_

“Before working in digital art and illustration I began

with drawing, painting and later graphics,” says

Haze. “I always loved the gesture and the warmth of

the sign in a sketch, in a stroke with acrylic or oil

colour, in the splashes of watercolour or ink.” When

he begins to develop an image he tries to “include

my manual skill” in the artwork.

MERGING THE HUMAN FORM WITH NATURE IS

THE SUBJECT OF MUCH OF HAZE’S WORK, SO

IT’S NOT SURPRISING THAT HIS METHOD USES

HANDMADE ELEMENTS

INCORPORATING

THE HANDMADE

TECHNIQUES HOW I MADE

06

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

Using some custom brushes and some

parts of photos I added various type of clouds (all

sorts of shapes and dimensions) over the subject.

05

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

In this phase I selected from other photos different natural elements

and textures – trees, plants, leaves, sky, water – and imported them on

separate layers, trying to meld them to the subject with blending modes to

obtain the double exposure effect.

08

GRADE SUCCESS

After numerous retouchings to finish the work, I added

a background texture and proceeded with the final colour

grading of the image using a Hue/Saturation layer, Curves and

Color Balance adjustments and blending mode tweaks.

04

BRUSH IT RIGHT

Now with the use of some particular brushes I refined the shape

of the handmade elements and with various adjustment layers tools like

Hue/Saturation, Selective Colour and Curves, I did the first colour

correction pass.

Zephirus: In Zephirus, as in Cosmogony Reloaded,

nature or rather with the four elements of fire, air, Haze’s aim was “to merge the human body with

water and earth, and even with a fifth esoteric element: the Aristotelian ether.”

07

SELECT ENHANCEMENTS

Before the final colour correction, I created

big red and blue stains with a large soft brushes to

enhance the colours of the image. Then I merged

them with the background using Multiply and

Overlay blending modes.