Photomanip: Interview with Ellyevans679

Hello, deviantART!

It gives me great pleasure to present another photomanipulation-related interview developed and conducted by one of our own community members (not by me!). It is wonderful when members get involved with the community and share a bit of themselves with the rest of us; we can all learn a lot from one another, which is very important as we grow as artists (regardless of our level of experience).

Without further ado, here is the interview of Ellyevans679, written and conducted by XilaPhoenixArt.

Elle, tell us a bit about yourself, please.

I’m  a self-confessed workaholic. I have always held jobs in publishing and graphic design but in 2005 went back to uni and completed by Bachelor of  Multimedia Arts and wasn’t working very much when I was a student. When  I graduated in 2010 it was really difficult to find a full-time creative job, and I got lots of rejection. On a particularly bad day I asked myself ‘what would you most like to be doing’. The answer was teaching art or publishing an arts magazine. 

My beautiful family is so supportive of my art and so I kept practicing and trying until now, three years later, I have three jobs; I teach Digital Art using Photoshop and Illustrator at a local college, I run a small graphic design business and recently I have received financial backing to launch  a creative magazine and website with the first issue due out next July.  I am very blessed and my advice to anyone wanting to work in the creative industries is ‘never give up’.

You are not a member of dA since that very long, but everybody will admit that your art rises  up so fast and so great. How do you do that, getting your photomanipulation skills so high so fast? Is it talent you are born with  or hard work or anything else?

Even as a child I was always drawn to artistic pursuits and grew up painting, singing and playing the  guitar. It was during the period without work that I joined dA and started experimenting with digital art for my own creative expression. If my art process has grown it is mainly due to this wonderful dA art community. There has been so much friendship and support here that my confidence has increased. There is also so much sharing of wonderful tutorials and stock. Just looking at the beautiful artworks of the dA artists in my inbox and in our groups always gives me something to aspire to.

Where do you get the inspiration from to make each new artwork?

Sometimes  from a dream or ideas come just before falling asleep. Words; stories, poetry, song lyrics often fire up ideas in my imagination. Other things that inspire me include; colour, nature’s beauty, sensuality, fabric, texture, music, symbolism, spirituality and mythology.

Do you often finish your creations being as close as possible to your original idea or do you end up with something totally different?

Somewhere  in between. I always have a very strong desire about what I want to express and the feeling hangs around the edges of my being until I can get it out. Usually I will start with a definite idea of how I want a model or landscape to look and then set about trying to find stock. This  is a hard way to work because, rather than it being the stock that inspires my work, I am always searching for the perfect stock to fit my ideal. I have spent many hours and occasionally quite a bit of money buying stock; luckily I enjoy it.

Once I have found the right starting point I try to let the composition and colour of the piece evolve so that they often move away from the original picture in my mind  but still capture the same concept or feeling.
Let’s talk about a few artworks of yours.

First this one:

How did you add those great tattoos on the woman?

This  is an exact example of spending ages searching for the right model stock. I had started this work a few times with different tattooed models but persisted looking until I found this one that was exactly what I was looking for. I had used one of this photographer’s models before in my artwork Tempest Nest.

The tattoos are body paint which I have coloured and enhanced. The model was originally very dark on an almost black background so I had to mask her out and place her in the water, lighten everything, paint back in the details and markings and paint a new skin tone.

The next one is this:

Your way of colorizing is fabulous. How do you know to put which colors where and how do you just manage them on the canvas?

Once  I finish composing the picture in many, many layers, I will flatten it down and start another creative experimentation with the colours. This can end up being many layers too as I paint in the light and try different colour blends to see what colours best enhance the features in  the artwork. My favourite blending modes are Soft Light and Multiply and I always use blurs and fiddle with the Opacity settings.

Last one:

How  did you blend the branches so well with the rest? Those are from only one stock... did you take many parts out of it and then distorted them or so?

This piece ‘The Dreaming’ was an exercise in absolute patience but it is one of my favourite works. It was an idea that came to me when my nanna passed away last year. Each of the tree branches have been painstakingly cut out using a layer mask and working with my pen and tablet to get in among all the fine detail. I have duplicated some of the branches and made them smaller or distorted them using the transform tools, flipped them, replaced them to create all the branch detail at the top of the picture. The droplets have all been individually painted back in so they are bright and look like water.

There  are some people who disregard photomanipulation as an art form because they do not understand the difficult process to blend photographic and painted elements to create a new ‘believable’ fantasy image. I have painted traditionally long before I started doing digital art and the computer process can be less free, just as detailed and definitely harder to learn in technique.

Here are a few other of her artworks for you to enjoy:

Thank you so much for this great interview, Elle. It was real fun to do this one with you!!

About the interviewer

XilaPhoenixArt, Vicky, is a Belgian artist who is new to our community but has already made great strides both with her art and with getting involved in the many things that are happening in photomanipulation. Enjoy some of her work:







Until next time--

Jade