Kalib Bryan

Kalib Bryan | When We Were Stars | 2025

Your works often merge human silhouettes with elements of nature. What initially inspired you to explore this artistic approach?

I’ve always been fascinated by double exposures in film, photography, and illustrations. I love exploring the concepts of human portraits blended with natural landscapes and nature itself. I love that these works convey a spiritual connection between the human and natural world. It inspires me to go out and explore something unique. Mainly in nature, but almost anything I see that inspires me. I connect with the energy of a place first. It’s almost like I easily find different figures that speak to me and I capture them. Then I’ll connect them with digitally painted portraits based off of people I see in my life, or in my dreams. To create something spiritual.

Kalib Bryan | The Wanderer | 2025

How has your education at the iPhone Photography School influenced your creative process?

I’ve always been drawn to photography, but never realized all the beautiful photos that can be taken with the iPhone. For the longest time I was a writer, but I was also an adventurer. I felt like I could convey a scene better through my iPhone than writing about it. Watching different courses about landscape, urban, and travel iPhone photography has pushed me to go out, explore, and experiment with different compositions of my own. It is the school that also introduced me to digital drawing and painting techniques if I wanted to enhance my photos into something otherworldly.

Can you walk us through the technical and artistic steps of creating one of your dreamscapes, from the first photo to the final artwork?

One of the works in my online gallery, ‘Stella Luna’ I started by going outside on a starry night and experimented with different shots that made the stars more prominent and used the silhouette trees as a frame. The shots were beautiful, but I wanted to make the photo more interesting, so I illustrated a star trail into the night sky. The photo made me think of a portrait of someone from another world. Or someone who once roamed the earth and became a watcher. So I digitally painted a closeup of a woman with dark hair, lunar blue eyes, and surrounded by a lunar glow. I had combined the two photos in photoshop and played around with the exposure until I got the right balance between the two images.

Kalib Bryan | The Sound Of Water | 2025

In your artist statement, you mention portraying “the beauty of solitude.” How do you translate such an emotional concept into visual form?

I’ve always been a solitary person. That’s the way I see it in nature too. All living things are created with a different purpose. We are all born to walk a different path. It’s fun to learn from different people, but so can exploring alone and creating alone. When you escape from the noise and crowds, you can discover more about yourself and the world. So when I go out on my own and find something beautiful that I’ve never seen in person before, it’s like I’ve discovered a new world. Sometimes I will incorporate silhouettes into my own photos to convey that feeling a little more.

Kalib Bryan | Stella Luna

Many of your works combine photography with digital painting. How do you decide which elements remain photographic and which are digitally painted?

All of my portraits are digitally painted or illustrated and I will combine them with actual landscape, abstract, or nature photos I took with my iPhone. Although, sometimes I will digitally illustrate another element into my iPhone photos to make them look more fantastical or mysterious. When I combine my portraits with my iPhone photos, it all depends on the color scheme, style, and lighting for me to decide which photos go together.

Kalib Bryan | Flower Essence | 2025

Nature plays a central role in your art. Are there specific landscapes or seasons that inspire you most?

I enjoy watching the changing of the seasons. I enjoy going to local forests and watch them change over the course of the seasons. Whether it’s changing its shapes, colors, shadows, and the way it moves and adapts to natural conditions. I’m drawn to the movement of water such as waterfalls and seaside beaches. Nothing soothes my creative mind more than listening to the sound of water. It keeps flowing, as do we. But I’m also drawn to natural figures and scenery all over the world that I hope to experience one day.

Kalib Bryan | A Sea Of Trees | 2025

You also work in animation projects as a background artist. How does this experience influence your fine art creations?

I recently finished an internship as a background artist for an animation adaptation of Clement C. Moore’s story ‘The Night Before Christmas’. Aside from photography, this experience has inspired me to digitally create backgrounds of my own. Create worlds of my own. While my main collection of art has to do with double exposures, as a dreamscape artist, being inspired by animation studios like Dreamworks and Disney, it is my goal to broaden my horizons and collaborate working on dreamy backgrounds for different animation projects one day.