Long-gone are the days when painting was strictly done with specialized tools, like brushes, on canvases. Nowadays artists use anything from remote-controlled toy cars to Molotov cocktails to express their talents. So it should come to know surprise Kyle Lambert uses just one finger and the Apple iPad to create detailed celebrity portraits.

Kyle Lambert is a young English artist who specializes in portraits rendered using an iPad tablet and an $8 app, called Brushes. He only uses one finger as the brush, but judging by the detailed outcome, you’d think he has a whole set of professional tools and paints. Lambert starts out by sketching the basic facial proportions, drawing simple lines where the mouth, nose and eyes should be, making sure he gets the shape of the sitter’s head just right. It looks like the kind of sketch even I could do, but he says it’s the most important part of making a portrait, because it serves as the framework for the entire piece.

After the initial sketch, he moves on to sketching the facial features, making sure he achieves a satisfying likeliness to the sitter, because modifications to the face will be difficult to make after this point. Then he adds tone to his sketch using the black paintbrush tool with various levels of opacity, before introducing highlights to the face, using the white paintbrush. Colors are added only in the final stages of the process, and blend with the black and white underneath. It’s amazing the level of detail he can achieve, starting from scratch, but it’s also proof of how far technology has come in recent years.