From time to time, we get to see really masterful digital art. The young Ukranian digital artist brings together photography and digital art, reality and dream, fairy tales and dark stories – and creates beautiful art from them using Photoshop. Viktoria Solidarnyh takes photos and turns them into composites. Some of them are realistic, while the others look more like digital drawings. All of them are made by combining many photos, and many artworks look like they belong on a book or movie cover. Bored Panda shows a quick before and after for those creations.
Viktoria is a young artist from Ukraine. She is officially a designer, but from 2012 to 2015, she studied photography as well. In parallel, she mastered Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. She needed the tools to retouch her own photos but then decided to explore digital art further. In January 2016, she armed herself with a graphic tablet and decided to devote her time to photo art. Since then, she began to study in depth all the possibilities of Photoshop. She used the Internet as the resource of tutorials, she was constantly practicing and participated in competitions. She published her work in various Photoshop communities so that experienced colleagues and ordinary viewers could give her their criticism and express their opinion about her work. And most importantly, she says she loved what she did with all her heart.
Viktoria’s favorite subjects are fairy tales, magic, and a bit of mysticism. She tells DIYP that she’s inspired by childhood stories and her favorite Disney cartoons, and you can clearly see that from her work. The heroes of her artwork are often princesses, children and animals. But sometimes, her scenes also feature the dark creatures like ghosts, vampires, demons and witches.
As Viktoria shares with DIYP, she often uses stock photos for her composites. But she’s been trying more and more to use as much as possible of her own photos. In the future, she plans to completely switch to her own photos as the resource, so that she can call her work “completely her own.” We asked Viktoria how long it takes her to create one digital art like this. On average, she says one image takes her 3-5 days if you take into account the time of finding the right photos. Oftentimes, this is also a long and painstaking process. Here’s more of Viktoria’s work:
The young artist shares with us that she’s glad to live in the 21st century, where she can independently learn her favorite skill, master it and share all her creativity with the world. She’s also glad there’s a tool like Photoshop, which gives her any colors, canvases, brushes and tools for work. All this gives her limitless opportunities to express her imagination and show her inner world, and we’re happy she shared a bit of her world with us.
About the Artist
Viktoria Solidarnyh is a 29 years old digital artist from Kirovskoe, Ukraine. She is formally educated as an artist-designer, and she has a great passion for digital art. If you’d like to see more of her work, you can find it on Deviant Art, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and VK. [collages via Bored Panda]
