Digital artist creates imaginary world by photoshopping stock photos found online

'Everything you can imagine is real'

A digital artist creates a perplexing and surreal world using a mix of stock photos he finds on the Internet.

Justin Peters, 22, from Germany, started his creative career capturing pictures of nature near his hometown, learning everything he knew about photography through trial and error.

However, after time he became bored by these “normal” photos and knew that he wanted to create something more special.

Inspired by surrealist painters, Peters began watching YouTube tutorials to learn different techniques and quickly cultivated his own unique style.

Creating digital art colleges, he started to blend together different objects and scenes to form a dreamlike world where he says “anything is possible.”

“Because I had a lack of locations and not the budget to travel a lot, I started to use stock photos after a while and tried to upload creative work every day,” he said.

“My work is inspired by surrealist painters, as well as ordinary objects that are particularly drawn to nature and space and I try to instil every piece with a sense of realism that is suddenly broken upon close inception.”

From carnival swing rides in space to a boy sitting next to a glowing moon on the beach, Peters has created an impressive body of imaginative work through unexpected imagery combinations and photo manipulations.

Living and working by the Pablo Picasso quote that “Everything you can imagine is real”, Peters hopes that his work will help people engage with their emotions and understand that they can do anything they want to.

"I hope that when people experience my work, they discover a new and different world, which they can dive into to prove that everything is possible when you open your mind,” he explains.

Now studying part time, Peters hopes to make digital art his main occupation.