After the large success of "Vanishing Girls", talented digital artist Emi Haze was approached by Safarà Editore to create an intriguing and visually appealing cover illustration for Lauren Oliver’s "Panic" Italian edition book. From New York Times bestselling author, Lauren Oliver comes with an extraordinary novel of fear, friendship, courage, and hope. Already optioned by Universal Pictures in a major deal, this gritty, spellbinding novel captures both the raw energy of fear mixed with excitement, as well as the aching need to find a place to belong.

The “Vanishing Girls” cover received a lot of appreciations. My objective then was to maintain the visual and intriguing attributes of the previous work. For "Vanishing Girls" I had adopted a very "introspective" solution, to enhance the psychological character of the novel, using the contours of the girl’s profile to create a world in it by the tones and thrillers veins.
- Emi Haze

In "Panic" I realized the opposite, there are no limits, the scenery literally spreads and extends along the back cover. The scene is focused on the “Opening Jump”, the Panic opening ritual, in which one must throw himself from a cliff into the lake below. The graphic / artwork style, the typeface, the design of the cover led back deliberately to the work previously developed for the " Vanishing Girls" by the same author. The double exposure technique is one of my favourite techniques in my latest works.Bringing together two or more photos creates a coherent image that can be beautiful, nostalgic or unsettling, depending on what photos you use and how you combine them. With double exposure, you can create a surreal and fantastic world beyond our imagination. The reason for using this technique varies, but they are surely created for the same purposes – beauty and uniqueness.

- Emi Haze

Photoshop is my main working software. If it had’t exist my works wouldn’t have probably been real and would have existed only in my mind or, at least, they couldn’t have been as they appear today. I use an iMac with an external display in my studio but my favorite and best tool is Wacom Cintiq. It’s my digital canvas, the place where my ideas come true, drawing directly on a display makes a more natural and speedier workflow. Before working into digital art and illustration I began with drawing, painting and later graphics. When I start developing an image I try to include my manual skill in the sign and in the use of colour digitally importing it into my artwork.

- Emi Haze

I combine in a single image hundreds of Photoshop layers with many and many graphic elements and textures. Using the blending modes, layer masks, adjustments layers the starting image becomes 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 (like trees, plants, leaves, clouds, etc.) I try to blend with the double exposure technique the human body with nature. Many among Photoshop tools are capital in my art works. I very much use blending modes – Multiply, Overlay, Soft Light - to obtain peculiar effects in the combination of different layers and textures, for instance the double exposures. The blending allows me to combine in the best way different elements, colours and images in a single work, creating shape and color compositions beyond imagination.

- Emi Haze

I’m very proud I realized the Italian cover of “Panic” and “Vanishing Girl”, the latest books of bestselling author Lauren Oliver. The big appreciation for these covers allowed me to be contacted by Penguin Random House of New York to create the cover jacket of “Glitter” the new young adult novel by the New York Times bestselling author Aprilynne Pike. It is a great gratification for my work. Planning and designing the cover of a book is always a big challenge and responsibility as you tend to represent with one image the content and the soul of the book. At the same time it must be intriguing and attractive in order to catch the attention of readers who usually read other genres.

- Emi Haze

About Emi Haze

Graduated from the Institute Design Palladio in Verona with a degree in Graphic Design and Advertising Design, Emi Haze is an independent digital artist and illustrator with a strongest passion for art and painting connected to technology. His digital works are a mixture of graphic elements and hand-drawn ink marks, acrylic or watercolour stains. In his recent works he tried to merge the human body with nature or rather with the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. The result is the vision of an imaginative ethereal world hanging between reality and fantasy, dream and utopia and in which color and sensitivity have the predominant role. He usually works for several clients and big agencies like Adobe, Wacom, Microsoft, Penguin Random House, Getty Images, etc. He collaborated with the agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco to be part of the Photoshop 25th Anniversary special advertising campaign commissioned by Adobe. His work “Cosmogony Reloaded” was included on the Adobe Photoshop 25th anniversary "Dream On" Oscars Spot was featured during the Academy Award Oscars 2015 ceremony and was also used in other media as part of an international bigger campaign. This spot has achieved three awards at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2015, a Graphite Pencil D&AD Award, two AICP Awards, a Webby Award and a nomination for Outstanding Commercial at Emmy Awards 2015. Recently he collaborated with the Wacom Art Studio of Washington for the new Wacom Intuos tablets advertising campaign and he has worked on the cover illustrations of the Italian editions of “Vanishing Girls” and “Panic”, the latest books of the the New York Times best-selling author Lauren Oliver. His works have been published on international digital arts magazines and specialized websites and are on sale in many art galleries.

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