Digital painter and illustrator Alex Andreev has a way with floating objects, otherworldly lands, and moments of strange emotion. Working out of St. Petersburg, Russia, he builds entire dystopian worlds using nothing more exotic than Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter, a deliberately small palette of brushes and colors, and no 3D rendering whatsoever — every eerie tower, every flooded plaza, every solitary figure is painted by hand, frame by frame. His work is both very quiet and very disquieting, closer in spirit to Soviet-era science-fiction cinema and literature — the kind of melancholy, contemplative futurism found in Stalker or the pages of the Strugatsky brothers — than to the glossy, hyper-rendered concept art that dominates so much of contemporary digital illustration today.
Trying to categorize or summarize the genre of Alex Andreev’s (previously) digital paintings is nearly impossible. Part science fiction, part dystopian future, the scenes are equally disturbing and beautiful, his characters inhabiting a world Andreev tells me is deeply influenced by Soviet-era literature, music and movies. Based in St. Petersburg, Russia he works primarily with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint and relies only on a small selection of brushes and colors to create each illustration, meaning there are no special effects or 3d-rendering of anything. Andreev recently published an art book, A Separate Reality, which is available through Blurb.com.
What has kept Andreev’s A Separate Reality world relevant well beyond its original 2012 unveiling is that he never treated it as a closed body of work. In the years since, he has continued returning to the same visual universe — the same washed-out skies, drowned architecture, and solitary figures — and pushing it into new mediums entirely. In 2017, Andreev began recreating scenes from A Separate Reality as fully three-dimensional virtual reality paintings, walking viewers through his dystopian landscapes rather than simply showing them a flat canvas, work that was covered by outlets including Engadget and Designboom as an early, genuinely striking example of what VR painting tools could do in the hands of a serious illustrator rather than a novelty demo. It is a rare case of a distinctive 2D illustration style surviving the jump into an entirely new format without losing what made it compelling in the first place — the same patient, unsettling stillness, just now with room to walk around inside it.
That staying power is part of why this piece still belongs in our design coverage more than a decade later. Andreev’s paintings sit at an unusually rich intersection of illustration, world-building, and speculative architecture — the towers, plazas, and ruined monuments in his scenes are as considered as anything in our futures and speculative design coverage, even though they were built stroke by stroke in a 2D painting program rather than rendered or modeled. For anyone drawn to art that imagines tomorrow as something to be quietly mourned rather than triumphantly announced, Andreev’s dystopias remain some of the most fully realized out there.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
