why artist serwah attafuah welcomes change in the digital world
We caught up with Serwah at Adobe MAX 2025.
We recently headed to sunny Los Angeles for Adobe MAX 2025, where we learnt about all the cool stuff happening at Adobe, got inspired and hung out with some rad members of the creative community.
One such creative was Aussie artist and Adobe MAX speaker Serwah Attafuah, who chatted about her career, influences and how to make your work stand out.
Who are you and what do you do? I'm a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Western Sydney/Dharug Land. I make a lot of Afrofuturist art, cyberpunk art, and abstractions of self. They’re kind of like portraits of future ancestors – people that don't quite exist yet.
I play death metal guitar, which is pretty fun, and I scream on stage. I just yell at people and do punk vocals.
You have a distinct art style. How did you get into it? It's an amalgamation of everything that I've ever experienced that has changed me. In my Adobe MAX talk, I talked about going to the Vatican when I was 10 years old and seeing the Incorruptible Saints in glass coffins, and they looked like they were still alive. I was like, “This is so crazy, metal, mystical.” I also love The Matrix, sci-fi, anything cyberpunk and anything digital tech. I love taking apart computers and putting them back together again, and hacking things.
Stylistically, I always wanted to create some sort of 3D artwork that is not super-realistic. It’s not trying to be close to real life. That’s why I say “abstractions of self”. I’m very inspired by anime, surrealist art and traditional art.
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What was the first program you ever used to digitally draw? It was actually Adobe Photoshop. My mum was a graphic designer and had Adobe Photoshop in the early 2000s. I remember making a little card by taking a picture from The Lord of the Rings and putting each one of my family’s faces on each one of the characters. I just cut them out with the wand tool or the lasso tool and printed it out.
We were expecting you to say something like Microsoft Paint! No, Mum said, “You’re gonna learn Photoshop now.” I was like, five.
Which programs and tools do you use now? Adobe stuff is big in the pipeline. I use Cinema 4D as my main 3D application, along with OctaneRender. My pipeline is chaotic. Sometimes when I’m making an artwork, there’ll be 15 programs running, websites, and all these other tools that I use outside of the computer, like sculpting, carpentry, collage or scanning fabrics. It's a big mishmash of different stuff.
There have been loads of changes to the digital world in the last couple of years. Has that influenced your practice, or hindered it? I’ve always welcomed that change – that’s how I’ve built my practice. I definitely wouldn't be where I am today if it weren’t for the rapidly moving technologies. When I first started doing digital artwork and 3D, the programs were so clunky. And this was about 15 years ago, so there were just four or five YouTube tutorials and that’s all you had. Now you go on YouTube, or even to Adobe, and do you know how many tutorials there are? It's unreal. In an hour, people are learning stuff that has taken me 12 years to figure out. So I definitely welcome that and I just try to move with it. I was one of the first people in Australia to get on NFTs in 2020.
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What does your creative process involve? It's very chaotic. My process definitely used to be more in line with traditional art. But another reason why I started doing digital art is because I lost a painting studio. My parents had a home studio in our garage where my dad would weld sculptures. We lost our house for a bit, and I was never able to have a studio at home until now, so I needed to push into that digital space.
For the longest time I would sketch out my works, and they would almost be their own artworks – that’s how much time I would put into paper sketches or digital sketches. But now it's gotten to the point where it's 50 different scrap pages of words, numbers or cut outs that I’ve found, or weird website links that have inspired me somehow, and that’s my draft. I mean, it’s just a pile of junk. For example, I was reading a bill and I had this really good idea for an artwork, and I thought, “I don't know how to sketch this, but I'm gonna keep this traumatic bill over here, because I know it reminds me of something I've got to make.” My drafting process has gotten more and more loose as I've grown older.
When you’re in a creative rut, what do you do to get the inspiration flowing? Sometimes I just listen to old bangers – playlists that I made from when I felt the most creative – and sometimes I’ll work on a different creative passion. I have ADHD, and I'll hyper-focus and hyper-fixate on one of them, and then I'll multitask and go on to another one.
If I completely cannot handle doing a digital artwork, I'll go and play guitar for as long as I can before I have to get back to the project. That'll calm me down and keep me in that creative flow. Or I'll go and do some oil painting.
I love going on the internet and finding some weird forum where somebody's talking about a technique that only they've ever used by making a mistake. Going on museum websites and the Internet Archive is a big inspiration. Rococo, Renaissance art and the Dutch Golden Age are massive ones, too.
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What advice do you have for up-and-coming artists who want to make their work stand out, but are concerned about AI? I went over this a bit in my Adobe talk, but you have to find your own voice, because I don't think AI can. Trust me, I've tried to get AI to replicate my voice before, and it's not been successful whatsoever. You need to define your vision and your wants for the future. For my artwork, a lot of it is about the future of my culture, my tribe, my heritage. What does that look like? I don't think AI can replicate that. It can never know. So really think about what you want and what you want to say, and once you have that clearly defined, you're gonna kill it. The world is your oyster.