A selection of Chin’s composite artworks, which combine stock and original photography to conjure imaginative scenes into reality.
In the eyes of artist Ted Chin, digital photography isn’t just a creative medium of choice, but a way of imagining surreal, otherworldly dreamscapes into existence.
Open Adobe Photoshop, and you’ll see one such composition by Chin: two flamingos tower over a tropical lagoon at improbable heights, as their bodies blend into fluffy pink clouds in the sky. Both photo realistic and fantastical, it’s the kind of scene that causes you to take a double take and wonder.
As an expert photographer and composite artist, Photoshop is core to Ted’s Little Dream (@tedslittledream) — the fitting moniker to his practice — and he couldn’t be more enthused to be commissioned as this year’s official splash page artist.
When Adobe first approached Chin with the commission, “I wanted to scream out of excitement! It was a surreal moment, for sure,” he says. “At first I didn’t know if it was a sure thing, so I was crossing all my fingers and knocking on wood.”
Born and raised in Taiwan, Chin emigrated to the U.S. as a high school student on exchange with a strong calling to the creative world. Experimenting with all sorts of mediums from a young age — painting, sculpture, drawing, and 3D animation, to name a few — Chin went on to study computer art in college, and later, pursued a master’s degree at The Art Institute of California in San Francisco, now his homebase of nearly a decade. As an independent artist, Chin has created composites, motion spots, campaigns, and more with clients including Apple, Puma, and Warner Bros.
Digital art’s blend of creativity and technology has been a happy medium, he says, between his family of engineers and his longtime passion for digital illustration, anime, manga, and all things Pixar and Studio Ghibli — not to mention an abiding fascination with the surrealist works of artists like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. “Their artworks send a strong message, and it can mean nothing or anything, but they want you to look at it and think about it,” says Chin. “I’m really drawn to that feeling of opening up a door of an imaginary world. You can interrupt reality any way you want.”
Here, Chin walks us through the process of creating this year’s Adobe Photoshop splash page identity — and how you can source Adobe Stock images to create your own fantastical composition.
Step one: Create your concept.
“I’ll come up with the concept first, and sketch it by hand,” says Chin. “I don’t always have to have a message — it could just be something fun or enjoyable to look at. Because at the end of the day, you just want people to feel something from your artwork.” Often a client will come to Chin with an idea and concept, but for his splash page commission, Adobe’s creative team asked Chin to recreate an original work from his portfolio using Adobe Stock images.
Step two: Source your imagery.
Next, Chin chooses the photos that he’ll use to create his composites. “Usually, I’ll find stock images or go out to shoot some new photos to come back and combine them together. That’s one way,” says Chin. “The second way is just browsing stock photos by keyword — this could be either a particular setting or mood, depending on the project — and seeing which one speaks to me.” For this particular artwork, Chin selected eight photos from Adobe Stock’s collection of hi-res, royalty-free images.
Chin selects eight Adobe Stock photos in all to create his composite artwork.
Step three: Do your research.
“Whenever I make something, I don’t want it to be too similar to anything someone else has made, so I went ahead and Googled ‘flamingo cloud’ to make sure.”
Step four: Study your images.
Once you’ve finalized your selection, closely examine the details of your photos. Chin emphasizes the importance of this step: “It’s going to sound a bit funny, but I’ll stay on a photo and stare at it for a long while until I see something, almost to the point that I’m hallucinating!” he jokes.
Step five: Play with scale.
Chin’s source images are rarely surreal on their own. But by combining and playing with elements of color, texture, and most importantly, the scale of each, the artist is able to create an artwork that’s entirely new. Clouds play a big part in Chin’s work for this reason: “I always like to look at clouds and see if their shapes remind me of any animals,” he says, and in this case, two fluffy pink clouds at sunset make a perfect foil for the rounded bodies of two flamingos.
Chin completes his artwork with the finishing touches.
Step six: Edit, edit, edit, and complete.
How does Chin decide when a work is complete? Even after hours of editing, “I don’t think it’s ever finished,” he says. “You just need to know when you’ve reached a point that you’re satisfied with it.” In this case, he’s more than happy with the results. “Photoshop is a program I started using maybe ten years ago. This is definitely one of the biggest milestones in my career.”
For more from Ted Chin, visit him on
Meet the other artists featured in this year’s Creative Cloud splash page identities.
