Interview with Digital Artist Emi Haze

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Emi Haze is a digital artist based in Monfalcone, Italy. Emi Haze graduated from the Institute of Design in Verona with a degree in Graphic Design and Advertising Design. His work has been featured in Adobe Photoshop’s 25th Anniversary and many other international magazines. Let’s find out more about this most popular artist in the creative world.

Hi Emi! Proud to have you here!

Your artworks are awesome. Where do your ideas come from ?

Thank you very much! In my opinion everything in every moment has an artistic side, the aesthetics of things, people around me…
For me everything has its own importance, images, textures, sounds, fragrances, my creativity is constantly stimulated.
In my works the human being melts with nature and its four elements to give birth to my inner world, ethereal and imaginative, hanging in balance between reality, dream and fantasy, in which color and sensitivity have the predominant role. An harmony that binds man and nature in a perfect way and which unfortunately nowadays seems to be a utopia.
Piles of tree branches, clouds forming hair, faces that melt with air and sky, human silhouettes that arise from expanses of earth and roots… this is my visionary world.

When did you start having an interest for digital art ?

I began with painting and drawing when I was attending the art high school. Then I discovered the digital art and I connected this great passion of mine with technology, taking a degree in graphic design and commercial art at the Design Institute Palladio in Verona.
The school was fundamental for my education and learning the programs necessary for the development of my work, but it is the constancy and above all the passion that I have for this job that allowed me to achieve excellent results.
Photoshop gave me the chance to combine drawing, painting and photography together to make my dreams and ideas come true. Nowadays there are not limits to what we want to create…the only limit is our imagination.

Have you ever been influenced by other artists? If so, who are they ?

I love Impressionism for the use of color and Surrealism for the subjects.
I could name many artists, painters and digital artists that have influenced me, at first in my painting and later in my digital art. Mentioning only few of them would be reductive, because all the art world is the fundamental source of inspiration in the creative process, and I’m referring not only to pictorial art but also to music, filmmaking, photography and fashion.

Beside digital art, what else you love to do ?

I have a lot of interests and passion. Music is one of the key of my creative process. Listening to my favourite artists like Sigur Rós, Radiohead, Bjork, helps me to immerse myself in my creative world and to have a right inspiration mood to develop a new work.
Also I could mention cinema, fashion, photography, and various sports.

Can you share with us the creating process behind ‘Cosmogony Reloaded’ ?

Cosmogony Reloaded is one of my artworks that I think fully represents my style, my world, my sensitivity.
In this artwork I wanted to give my representation of the origin of the universe. A girl that comes out and materialize herself from the sky, through an heap of clouds and an explosion of colors.
The artwork starts from a photo and the first phase is its retouching. Afterwards I digitally import various hand-made elements such as scratches, ink marks, acrylic or watercolor stains. Then there a phase of image processing through the merging of these elements with elements of nature like trees, plants, leaves, clouds, water, fire, etc.
Before working into digital art and illustration I begun with drawing, painting and later graphics. I always loved the gesture and the warmth of the sign in a sketch, in stroke with acrylic or oil color, in the splashes of watercolor or ink.
So today when I start developing an image I try to include my manual skill in the sign and in the use of color digitally importing it into my artwork.
I combine in a single image hundreds of Photoshop layers with many and many graphic elements and textures. All the Blending Modes, layer masks, Adjustments layers I use, make the starting image less digital and more similar to a painting or a drawing.
This phase of manual elaboration is then merged with the strictly digital one.
Selecting parts of different photo images I try to blend with the double exposure technique the human body with nature and its four elements, fire, air, water and earth.