Ard’s creative process requires quite a lot of time and patience, but it results in impressive photographs of people who seem to be actually posing together. In order to reach that, he has to not only choose the right pictures—typically taken decades apart—but also properly adjust their scale and tone.
In a recent interview with Bored Panda, the artist said that when he first came up with the idea, he tried it out with his own photos. “It started with one [picture] of myself as some kind of funny tryout thing. Later, I began with Dutch celebs and not much later, a logical step was to do celebs all over the world,” he shared.
The photoshop master has covered all sorts of celebrities, from actors posing with their most popular characters, singers with their ‘mini-mes’, stars from the world of sports, and others. When it comes to choosing the person for the next creation, Ard admits to going for someone who’s popular at that given time for one reason or another.
“I often look at who’s trending at a time. Are they leading in a film or TV series? Is there some kind of trending thing going on in sports, fashion, music or entertainment. And very often I post on their birthdays and sometimes when a person passes away to honor that person,” he told Bored Panda.
By putting them on a pedestal, we often forget that celebrities are as human as anybody else, which means that time affects them as well. “I just think it’s nice to see how a particular person has changed over the years,” Ard said. “And in the case of the ones with their movie characters I love to see the transformations. And also give them a kind of memory, a trip down their own memory lane.”
The artist said that he first encountered Photoshop back in school; however, he gained most of the skill by trial and error while working on his own. “I went to a graphics school and at the end of my education (mid ‘90s) we got Photoshop as teaching material. But because I finished the study at that time I learned it later mostly by myself at home.”
Blending the two images is not an easy task as it is; however, the graphic designer often chooses to take it one step further and depicts the subjects hugging or touching each other. That definitely requires skill and patience, but Ard revealed that that’s not the only tricky part that’s difficult to get right. According to the artist, working on the hair can be pretty challenging as well.
Celebrities in Ard Gelinks’s pictures are typically known all over the world and are often quite idolized. Such significance can be advantageous and alarming at the same time, depending on how they choose to use their fame. One example of that is the question of body image, which is very much influenced by how renowned celebrities portray it.
Newport Academy pointed out that the way they speak of the topic matters, especially when it comes to teenagers. For instance, one sentence about admiring the anorexic-like body type can have a strong negative affect, as lots of young people tend to follow what their idols say or do. Similarly, influential people taking the stand in favor of a healthy body image can positively affect the people that look up to them.