Adobe Creative Cause: Meet the winner

To Support The Prince’s Trust, Adobe launched the Creative Cause competition. Here, we catch up with the winner to find out more about his work.

Here at Adobe, we don’t need an excuse to get creative, but for the last two months we’ve had an extra incentive. As part of our work with the Prince’s Trust, we founded the Adobe Creative Cause competition, which encouraged people across the UK to get artistic and share their masterpieces inspired by the charity’s work on social media.

As a charity, the Prince’s Trust enables disadvantaged youths to reach their full potential. It’s an incredible organisation that has been central in supporting those such as Kieran Wood, Craig Walker and Laine Esperanzate in turning their lives around and gaining the skills necessary for work in today’s day and age.

With support from the initiative’s sponsors Canon, BenQ and Scan Pro, and the participants who shared artwork on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the #AdobeCreativeCause hashtag, we helped drive awareness to the work of the charity, and helped to raise money for it too.

We were blown away by the number of brilliant pieces of artwork submitted, which followed themes of transformation, inspiration, aspiration and freedom. But there could only be one winner, and so a number of us here at Adobe HQ, Canon, BenQ, Scan Pro, Torpedo and Red Consultancy put our judging hats on and analysed each and every entry to see which creative genius was set to become the poster-child for our inaugural competition.

Stuart Burton took the crown, with his piece ‘Lost & Found’, which visually explores the contrasting themes of isolation and hope, to embody the work of The Prince’s Trust. We spoke to him to find out more about his inspiration.

Tell us about your submission – what was the story behind it?

When I saw Adobe’s Creative Cause competition, I sought to get a true feeling and understanding of those who had had their lives transformed by the Prince’s Trust. I read many success stories, most of which spoke of an unfortunate past, with themes such as ‘broken’, ‘isolation’ and ‘loneliness’ being very common. There was a stark contrast in the themes that followed after their help from the Prince’s Trust, where there was an overwhelming sense of positivity, a feeling of purpose, and the ability to chase dreams.

I looked to explore this sense of contrast in my entry. I wanted to create a piece that showed change in different ways that was interesting to look at and have elements that you may not pick up on at first glance and made you think more of what each element in the piece represents.

The outer part of the image tells you of this person’s troubled past, and the inner part shows you a colourful future that is within this person – not just from the help of the Trust, but from the person themselves. I wanted to create a sense that we all have the inner strength to seek help and achieve our goals.

What techniques did you use to create it?

To achieve the double exposure style that I was aiming for, I found using blending modes within Photoshop to be a great way to combine the images together. I also used masks, adjustments, lighting effects, filters, colour adjustments and brushes for the smashed glass effect and the gritty concrete background. These are all techniques I’d used many times before over the years, but I think this is the biggest piece I’ve created where I’ve used them all. There were a lot of layers – it was one of the biggest PSD files I’ve ever created!

What Winning means to Me

It’s hard to put it into words! Adobe must see a lot of inspiring work on a daily basis and for the judges to select mine out of hundreds of other great entries was amazing. It’s amazing to be recognised for such a big cause such as the Prince’s Trust, and by Adobe. The prize was great, too. It’s a great way to end the year and start the new one with some cracking photography – something I need to improve on!

You can find more details about the Creative Cause competition, here.