Arina Emelianova
Images: Arina Emelianova / ohyes3d
For people meeting you for the first time, how did you get into 3D, how long have you been working in the medium, and what kept you there?
I spent ten years as a fashion photographer. It taught me light, styling, and how an object performs in front of a camera. But I always wanted more control than a camera could give me. In 2020, when COVID made shooting impossible, I started teaching myself 3D, slowly and mostly as a hobby. Everything changed in 2023. I stopped treating 3D as a side skill and started seeing where I could actually go with it. That's when I found my own visual language, and I've been building on it ever since. What kept me here is something I'd been looking for my whole career: the chance to be an author, not just the person executing someone else's picture. In photography I was mostly a designer of images. In 3D I finally get to be an illustrator and an artist. I invent the world, not just shoot it.
There’s a sense of playfulness in your work even when the execution is incredibly polished. How do you protect that sense of experimentation when 3D itself can become such a technical process?
For me, the story always comes first. I'm not interested in technique for its own sake. There are plenty of artists who are far more technical than I am, and I'm genuinely fine with that, because that's not the game I'm playing. I start every piece from the story, so the playfulness is there from the very first moment. Without it, there's no work at all. It's honestly what drives me. Where the technical side does excite me is light and materials. That's where I get to play. The way light hits a glossy surface or sinks into something soft can make an object feel funny, tender or a little suspicious. Together with casting the right characters for each story, light and materials are how the playfulness actually reaches the image. So I never have to protect it from the technical process. The technical process is how I deliver it.
You work with materials like glass, metal, reflective surfaces, and gems that can be deceptively difficult to make feel convincing in 3D. What draws you to those materials, and what have you learned from working with them?
Clients always mention my metallic highlights and reflective surfaces, so I suppose I can't hide it. These materials make a frame feel alive and saturated. They make it sexier. There's a reason desire in advertising has always been shiny: a reflective object looks like something you want to touch and own. A reflective surface also opens a second world inside the image. It shows you what's around the object, what's behind the camera, what you can't otherwise see. That gives the scene extra depth. And I love retro photography shot with continuous light, with its bloom and light streaks. Reflective materials give me that almost for free. The light catches the metal or the glass and the glow just happens. What I've learned is that a convincing reflection is never really about the material. It's about what the material reflects. Glass looks real when there's a world around it to bend, and gold looks precious when the light is a little too generous. So now I build the environment for the reflections as carefully as the object itself.
Your work often sits somewhere between product photography and something more surreal. How do you decide when an image should feel grounded in reality and when to push it somewhere unexpected?
Product photographers are a huge inspiration to me. There are so many incredibly talented people in that field, and they already do beautiful work with real objects in real light. So every time I start a piece, I ask myself one question: what can I show that a camera never could? That's my reason to be in 3D. What stays grounded is the material. I want every surface to feel so real you'd believe you could touch it. What I push is the situation around it. There are many ways in. Sometimes I build a story around the product, create characters for it, and exaggerate one property that makes it special. Sometimes I show the world of the person who uses it, through the objects they keep around them. Whatever the approach, I pick the version that couldn't exist in our world. Sometimes the brand's own universe points the way. Sometimes it comes purely from my imagination and my memories.
When you begin a new piece, what tends to be the starting point — an object, a material, a composition, a reference, or simply something you want to experiment with?
Almost always an image. I spend a lot of time looking: online, in films, and especially in the street. I think that comes from my years as a photographer. I'm constantly paying attention to what's around me, and when something catches my eye, I take a photo or make a note so I can come back to it later. It can be something completely random.
Color feels like an important part of your visual language. Does a palette usually exist in your head at the beginning of a project, or does it emerge as you're building the image?
Over the years my palette has become something like a home I keep coming back to. Red, pink and purple are my favorite colors, and even when I deliberately try a completely different palette, I somehow end up back there. I'm drawn to nostalgic colors, the saturated tones of 1950s and 60s American kitsch, and that's something I genuinely love rather than a style I chose. It does evolve. Lately more dark colors have been creeping in. But for me color is about emotion first. From the very beginning I wanted my work to give people something good: joy, love, happiness, tenderness, passion. Even when an image gets darker or a little strange, it's still about desire and warmth, just with more mystery. I want people to feel something kind when they look at my work.
Looking at where your work is today, what are you excited to explore next — whether that's a new technique, type of project, collaboration, or something completely outside what people currently associate with your work?
Characters. I've started exploring this, and I'm sure my own heroes will appear over time. Some may be more cartoonish. Some will be anthropomorphic sweets and pastries, which I absolutely love: adorable, a little strange, and made of textures you want to eat. Once you have characters, you want them to move and to live somewhere. So I'm bringing more motion into my work. And I want to step off the screen entirely. I'm drawn to projections, spatial installations and physical environments, worlds people can actually walk into. That's where I'm heading, sooner or later. And there's a personal project I've quietly started. It has no commercial angle at all. It's a story about something more intimate, and it will take its time. I'm letting it.