The Photo-Like Fire-Painted Portraits of Alex Peter Idoko

Nigerian artist Alex Peter Idoko uses fire, razorblades and sandpaper to create stunningly-realistic portraits that look more like sepia-toned photos.

Pyrography, or painting with fire, is an intriguing art form that involves the decoration of a wooden canvas with burn marks resulting from a controlled flame or heated instrument, like a poker. It’s a less forgiving art than traditional painting, as mistakes are much harder to fix or hide due to the destructive nature of fire. However, some artists control the unusual medium so well that they can create photo-quality artworks that are almost indistinguishable to the naked eye.

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Argentinian Farmers Plant Lionel Messi’s Face in Their Corn Fields

Over twenty Argentinian farmers and massive fans of football legend Lionel Messi, grew a giant portrait of the popular player in their corn fields, as a tribute.

Lionel Messi has millions of fans all around the world, but nowhere is he more beloved than in his home country of Argentina, where most people see him as nothing less than a god of football. Messi recently led the Argentinian national team to win the 2022 World Cup, which made him even more popular than before, but his true fans were sure this was going to be his year even before the tournament started. For example, shortly before last year’s World Cup kicked off, more than 20 Argentinian farmers used a farming engineer’s planting algorithm to create giant portraits of Messi in their corn fields.

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Self-Taught Artist Paints Photo-Like Hyperrealistic Portraits

Emel Espiritu, a young, talented artist from the Philippines, has been drawing a lot of attention because of his hyperrealistic portraits which are almost indistinguishable from photographs.

As a young boy, Emel Espiritu loved to draw, so his father taught him the basics. However, as he grew up, his interest for drawing only grew, but his father didn’t want him to pursue an artistic career and pushed him toward a more practical profession. Emel studied “fisheries” in college, but he never really got over his passion. He never stopped drawing. Instead, he honed his skills by watching YouTube tutorials and working odd jobs so he could afford painting supplies. Luckily, it all paid off, as the young artist is now famous for his ultra-realistic painted portraits.

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Talented Artist Burns Hyperrealistic Portraits onto Pieces of Wood

Ivan Djuric, a talented pyrographer from Serbia, creates incredibly detailed portraits of celebrities by burning them onto pieces of wood using a special tool.

Pyrography, as an art form, can be traced back thousands of years, with evidence of its early existence discovered in countries like China, Egypt and the ancient Roman Empire, but modern artists have really elevated pyrography to an unprecedented level. take Serbian artist Ivan Djuric, whose incredibly detailed portraits rival black-and-white photographs in terms of realism. Using a pyrography tool, he applies varying and precise amounts of pressure to change the intensity of the burn, thus achieving various tones and contrasts.

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The Intricate Nail And Thread Portraits of Konstantin Khlanta

Russian artist Konstantin Khlanta creates intricate portraits of celebrities and fictional characters by wrapping colored string around strategically placed nails.

27-year-old Khlanta, who hails from the Russian city of Tula, only started doing string art in 2018, when he created a portrait of Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park, who had passed away a year before. Interestingly, it was Linkin Park who inspired Konstantin’s artistic career, as he only took up drawing back in 2008 after hearing their son the music video for Linkin Park’s ‘Numb’ in which he saw a woman drawing and decided to give it a try himself.

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Kinetic Portraits Reveal Different faces When Viewed From Opposite Angles

Self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas is a master of kinetic wall art, creating not one, not two, but three distinct portraits in a single painting, each revealed when the artwork is viewed from a certain angle.

Sergi Cadenas’ amazing artworks consist of rigid vertical strips that he paints individually, by hand. The ‘trick’ is to paint a different person on each side of each strip, so that when viewed from opposite sides, a different person can be seen. But if you stand right in front of the kinetic painting, the features of the two portraits blend to create a third portrait.

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The Scribbled Portraits of Liz Y Ahmet

Liz Y Ahmet is a self-taught artist who uses a seemingly messy technique to create incredibly detailed and expressive female portraits.

A ‘scribble’ is usually defined as “a piece of writing or a drawing that is done quickly or carelessly”, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Liz Y Ahmet’s work. While her style certainly looks very similar to scribbling, it’s not done quickly and it certainly isn’t careless. The talented artist’s technique is intentionally messy so as to “portray the chaos of emotions that are hidden beneath” her characters’ mask-like visage.

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This Company Creates Awesome Portraits of Your Pets as Lords

If you’re looking to have some goofy fun while quarantined in your own home, how about investing in a high quality portrait of your pet as a pompous royal?

Enter Crown & Paw, a company dedicated to helping pet owners honor their bundles of joy by creating hilarious digital portraits of them as generals, princes, or ladies, whatever title the client desires. The company curates a collection of authentic 19th century portraits and rare Renaissance era oil paintings, and combine them with pet portraits to hilarious effect. Seriously, just look at the examples below.

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Artist Uses Black Paper and White&Grey Pencils to Create Portraits of Women Cast in Light

Looking at English artist Zulf’s portraits, you get the sense that they’re really simplistic in nature. They’re not the most detailed, heck they sometimes just outline a woman’s face, but that’s just what makes them special.

We’ve seen some truly mind-blowingly realistic portraits in the past, such as the masterpieces of Alena Litvin or those of Dylan Eakin; the works of London-based artist Zulf are nowhere near as detailed, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less magical, quite the opposite really! What makes these works unique is the concept of light being cast on part of the protagonists’ faces, which only reveals part of their visage, letting the viewer imagine the rest.

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Insanely-Talented Artist Paints Hyper-Realistic Portraits of Wildlife

Over the years we’ve featured some impressive hyper-realistic art on Oddity Central, but when it comes to animal portraiture, I’m pretty sure Canadian artist Nick Sider takes the cake.

Nick Sider knew he wanted to be an artist since he was just 5-years-old, but it took him another 20 years to build up the courage to dedicate his life to painting. At the age of 25, he quit his job and started teaching himself how to paint with acrylic paints. Looking at his works, you would think Nick has decades of experience behind him, but he’s actually only 31-years-old, so to say that he made up for lost time in just six years would be a serious understatement.

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The Hyper-Realistic Pencil Portraits of Alena Litvin

Moscow-based artist Alena Litvin has a very special gift – she can recreate a detailed photographic portraits using only colored pencils and mountains of talent. The results are often so impressive that you can barely tell the drawing apart from the photo.

Looking at her amazing drawings, it’s very hard to believe that Alena is a self-taught artist who has only been exercising her craft for the last eight years. From portraits of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson or Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, to regular people who commission her to draw portraits of their loved ones, there’s nothing the young Russian artist can’t pull off. She can take up to 10 days to finish a portrait, which may sound like a long time, but just look at the level of detail in some her artworks…

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Artist Creates Amazing ‘Web Portraits’ Using a Single Sewing Thread

Slovenian artist Sašo Krajnc creates incredibly detailed portraits by tightly winding a single sewing thread on a circular wooden frame to create overlapping straight lines.

That’s actually the most impressive thing about Sašo Krajnc, that he’s able to create such detailed facial features, like the curvatures of the eyes and lips, using only straight lines. He starts out with a circular frame made of wood or aluminium and lined with metal nails. He then takes a long sewing thread and begins winding it around these nails creating hundreds, or even thousands of black straight lines that crisscross and overlap to emphasise the features of his subjects.

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The Photo-Like Painted Portraits of Yasutomo Oka

These lovely portraits may look like high-definition artistic photographs, or even the product of CGI, but they are actually oil paintings created by Japanese artist Yasutomo Oka

At just 34-years-old, Yasutomo Oka is quite obviously already a master when it comes to hyperrealistic paintings. The artist, who hails from Komaki, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, spends up to a month working on one of these masterpieces, making sure that they turn out as realistic as possible, and the result is almost always awe-inspiring.

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Artist Creates Detailed Portrait with 20,000 Sunflower Seeds

Shanghai-based artist Hong “Red” Yi is well known for her use of unconventional materials, and her latest masterpiece – a portrait of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made with 20,000 meticulously arranged sunflower seeds – is worthy of her reputation.

Inspired by Ai WeiWei’s quote – “the seed is a household object but at the same time it is a revolutionary symbol” – Red sprinkled 20,000 sunflower seeds onto a white canvas and painstakingly arranged them all by hand to recreate Weiwei’s famous portrait with his hands stretching his eyes wide open. Remarkably, she managed to capture his features in great detail, just like she had managed to do with other unusual mediums in the past.

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Swedish Artist Creates Incredibly Realistic Drawings with Thousands of Tiny Dots

23-year-old Julia Koceva has taken the internet by storm with her impressive drawings created using an old technique known as stippling – creating pattern and applying varying degrees of solidity or shading to it by using small dots.

A criminologist by day, Koceva spends her nights working on her amazing drawings. She takes between 40 and 100 hours to finish a piece, painstakingly applying tiny black dots to a large piece of paper, using nothing but a ballpoint pen. As Alphonso Dunn, author of “Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide,” says, stippling creates a unique texture but requires patience and a meticulous approach. It’s a technique that requires nerves of steel and mountains of patience, but the end results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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