You may have seen Russian digital artist Oleg Dou’s work before gracing the box for Adobe’s Photoshop CS6. Dou creates eerie, yet alluring, portraits through photography, post-production and other techniques. “When I was 13 I got a computer, which was my salvation,” Dou said in an interview with Olga Sviblova, the director of the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Later in the article Dou explains where his ideas came from. “At home we had albums of classical paintings. I loved to look over them, especially the sorrowful, eyebrow-less, pale medieval portraits…
. I had a friend who was similar to a character from these paintings. When I got a camera I decided to do a portrait of her. She didn’t have perfect skin, so I had to retouch the image on the computer. Seeing as I didn’t have the right tools, however, I overdid it. This was a mistake that had interesting results. I began experimenting with this approach, and in the end it became associated with me.”