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Egyptian artist defies odds with Photoshop's newest cover

After having his artwork featured on the cover of Photoshop's latest edition, Amr Elshamy hopes to transition from digital art to animated movies.
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The millions of people worldwide who will likely open the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, the leading image-editing computer program, will be greeted by a splash screen depicting an image from “Falling … (Round Things),” by Egyptian digital artist Amr Elshamy. Against all odds, Elshamy, also an aspiring filmmaker, has become the first Egyptian and first Arab artist to have artwork featured on a Photoshop splash screen. The happy-go-lucky Elshamy never imagined that “Falling” would produce a reaction contrary, so to speak, to its title — i.e., rising to the top of the digital art world.

“Falling” consists of three panels that depict, respectively, a girl appearing to fall from the sky toward a circle of trees, a boy standing amid circular mountains, and the two preceding images combined. Adobe selected the image of the boy alone for the splash screen of Photoshop CC 2017.

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