Johannes Wessmark is a self-taught Swedish artist who specializes in hyperrealistic acrylic painting that rivals high-resolution photography.

Johannes Wessmark was born in Karlstad, Sweden in 1962. He had a happy childhood, but he wasn’t the most popular of his peers, preferring instead to observe without interacting. Looking back, the Swedish painter remembers some quirks that hint at the attention to detail his art is now world-famous for. When he was 10, he decided to start cleaning his own room, just to make sure it was done exactly the way he wanted. He sorted all of his toys in straight lines and in color order, which was a bit odd for a kid his age. He also drew and painted a lot, and his mother encouraged him to develop his artistic side, which turned out to be a great idea, as Johannes is one of the world’s most respected hyperrealistic artists.

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Nguyen Phat Tri, a young hairstylist from Vietnam, has been getting a lot of attention for his eye-catching floral hair designs.

28-year-old Nguyen Phat Tri graduated from An Giang University, with a degree in Biotechnology,  in 2015, but as he always had an inclination for the arts, he decided to go to Ho Chi Minh City to study makeup and hairdressing. That may have seemed like a controversial career choice, but time proved that it was the right one, as young Phat Tri quickly made a name for himself on the Vietnamese hairstyling scene, thanks to some truly innovating techniques and designs.

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Armed with an Xacto knife and mountains of patience, Japanese artist Gaku turns all kinds of fruits and vegetables into ephemeral works of art.

Inspired by the Japanese traditional food carving art mukimono, Gaku takes fruits or vegetables from the grocery store and carves them into a variety of intriguing patterns, from geometrical designs to traditional motifs and symbols, and even animal models. But apart from the skill and patience required to create these stunning food carvings, the most impressive thing about Gaku is his speed, as many times the artistic process is a race against time to make sure that oxidation doesn’t ruin his artwork. Weh working on apples or other produce that tends to oxidize quickly, he has to finish his designs in just a few minutes and still have time to photograph them.

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Julie Rhodes is a UK-based artist who specializes in photo-like hyperrealistic paintings of wildlife, particularly big cats like lions and tigers.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking Julie Rhodes’ paintings for photographs, as the differences are very hard to spot for the untrained eye. From her subjects’ intricate fur patterns, to the perfect coloring of the cats’ thick coats and the reflections in their eyes, these paintings are almost perfect. A professional artist with over 20 years of experience, Rhodes specializes mainly in paintings of big cats (lions, tigers, and leopards) but doesn’t shy away from portraying other animals as well, like elephants and zebras.

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The New York Earth Room at 141 Wooster Street is a unique NYC attraction created in 1977 by local artist Walter De Maria by filling an apartment with 140 tons of dirt.

Consisting of 250 cubic yards of fertile dirt covering the floor of an apartment located on the second floor of a building on Wooster Street, The New York Earth Room is one of NYC’s most unusual artsy attractions. The Dia Art Foundation commissioned local artist Walter De Maria to create it in 1977, and it was opened to the general public in 1980. De Maria had previously created two other earth rooms in Germany, but the one in New York is the only one in existence today. Art lovers can visit the unusual attraction, gaze upon the mass of dirt and take in its earthy fragrance, but they are forbidden from stepping on the dirt or even touching it.

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A French graphic designer managed to mix his love of beer with a passion for art by creating beautiful beer bottle cap mosaics of various pop icons.

You could say Paris-based graphic designer Jean Marie Lambert drinks in the name of art. Having noticed that the various beers he loved so much had different colors and designs, he one day decided to combine them into an original mosaic, and the result was so impressive that he decided to turn it into a whole series. Inspired by famous artworks like the Mona Lisa or Girl with a Pearl Earring, and icons like Han Solo or football superstar Maradona, Lambert creates mosaics that a just detailed enough to be familiar and attract viewers’ attention.

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Brazilian tattoo artist Clayton Dias has been getting attention for his signature holographic sticker tattoos that not only have the characteristic metallic shimmer of the real thing but also appear to be applied on the skin.

Sticker tattoos have become really popular lately, and the rising popularity of artists like Lucke Cormier is a clear example of that, but the tattoo style is continually evolving. Case in point, the work of Clayton Dias, a talented tattoo artist from Porto Alegre, Brazil, who has developed his own technique of giving sticker tattoos the holographic treatment, which gives them a characteristic metallic shimmer.

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Some people are so incredibly talented that they can be artistically inspired by the most unexpected of things, such as spilled drinks. Case in point – Italian artist Giulia Bernardelli, whose amazing coffee art began as a mishap.

One day, Giulia was drawing and having her coffee at the same time. At one point, she moved her hand too quickly and spilled her coffee all over the canvas, but the way the coffee stain spread inspired her to pick up the spoon and use it as a brush, to guide the brown liquid. And that’s how her journey into coffee art began. She got better and better at it, and today Bernardelli is regarded as one of the world’s best coffee artists.

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Funky Matas, a social media entertainer based in Florida, holds the world record for most signatures tattooed on the back, including those of celebrities like Will Smith or Gerard Butler.

Funky, real name Juan Matas, used to work as a tattoo artist himself and came up with the project that would end up defining his career as an online entertainer while thinking of a unique project with his body as the canvas. In the end, he narrowed the quest down to two options – turning his back into a MySpace-like form for his family and friends to fill out, or having his friends sign his back with a tattoo machine. The latter was more down his alley, considering his profession, only it didn’t stop with his friends. His family signed his back as well, then famous tattoo artists, and before he knew it, Funky Matas was chasing celebrities and asking them to sign his back so he could then permanently ink it onto his body. His back now has over 225 tattooed signatures, a world record.

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Fabio Gomes Trindade, a talented Brazilian street artist, creates stunning graffiti masterpieces by combining his detailed portraits with branches of trees and flowering bushes.

Whenever he starts work on a new project, Fabio Gomes Trindade first chooses the location of the artwork. The presence of lunch trees or flowering bushes is critical, as they basically make up about half the artwork. The Brazilian artist uses graffiti to depict the faces and part of the hair of the portraits he creates, letting nature take care of the rest. Seeing the artworks from the perfect angles, they look like a perfect collaborative effort between man and nature.

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Japanese artist 慧人 (Keito) has been drawing a lot of attention on social media with his incredibly realistic colored pencil drawings which are almost impossible to tell apart from actual objects.

Trompe l’oeil (literally “cheat the eye” in French) is a centuries-old painting and drawing technique design to do just what its name implies. Obviously, the degree to which the viewer is deceived depends mostly on the talent of the artist, and in the case of Keito, an 18-year-old youth from Japan, the deceit is almost always guaranteed. The young artist’s 3D rendering skills are so off-the-chart that some of his artworks don’t even look like drawings.

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CJ Hendry is a talented artist whose detailed three-dimensional pencil drawings are virtually indistinguishable from high-definition photographs or computer-generated images.

Australian-born CJ Hendry is able to draw just about anything, from crumpled designed paper bags, to leather boxing gloves and magnified flowers showing off their every detail. She spends between 80 and 200 hours working on a single piece, and it shows. A close inspection of her drawings shows incredible attention to detail and an ability to make the subjects depicted almost life-like, as if they are merely placed on the canvas, not drawn on it.

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A talented makeup artist has been getting a lot of attention online thanks to her short TikTok clips where she apparently uses her skills to turn into stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish.

We’ve seen makeup artists use tricks of the trade to transform into doppelgangers of celebrities and iconic characters before, but not in the way the artist posting under the @gilianisme TikTok handle does it. The end result, in most of the clips I’ve seen, is suspiciously realistic, which make me wonder if she is using some sort of digital manipulation to achieve this impressive result. No way to no for sure, really, but if she can pull this sort of transformations only with makeup, she is more of a sorceress than a makeup artist.

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UK-based artist Justin Bateman creates some of the most amazing ephemeral artworks you’ve ever seen – intricate mosaics made up of hundreds, even thousands of colorful pebbles.

Looking at some of Justin Bateman’s masterpieces, it’s hard to believe that this level of detail can be achieved using only by arranging colorful pebbles and small rocks. And yet the English artist does in fact spend several hours putting each artwork together out of small fragments of rock. What makes his effort even more impressive is that his works are usually assembled on beaches, meaning they are only temporary. Can you imagine creating something as spectacular as these mosaics only to take a few photos of it and then walk away knowing it will be lost forever?

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A young  Vietnamese nail art expert who had to close down his business during the pandemic, used the time off to develop a stunning new kind of artificial fingernail art.

Le Dai Phat is recognized as one of the most talented nail artists in Ho Chi Minh City, and looking at his stunning hand-painted designs it’s easy to see why. From celebrity portraits to religion and Vietnamese culture-inspired designs, the 28-year-old artisan can create some truly impressive wearable artworks. But it was a new style he developed while quarantined at home because of Covid that really got people talking about him. Using up to 10 lined-up artificial fingernails, Phat is able to paint entire stories in the greatest of detail.

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