A Missouri family recently got a taste of internet stardom after sharing a series of hilariously bad “professional photograph” that they had paid just under $250 for. And the funniest thing is they consider it money well spent.

In May of last year, Dave and Pam Zaring, of Hillsboro, Missouri, were contacted by a middle-aged woman who marketed herself as an experienced professional photographer. Having gotten married three years ago, the couple decided it was time for their first family photo shoot, so they took the so-called professional photographer up on her offer.  The couple, their two sons, Cade, 12, and Connor, 8, and Dave’s mother Sharon drove to the lovely Forest Park, in St. Louis, where they paid the photographer just under $250 to snap a few pics of them as one big happy family. The shoot went great, and the woman said she would be in touch again in a few weeks, after editing the photos. However, weeks turned to months, and the family nearly forgot all about the pics. I guess, they figured they got scammed and moved on with their lives.

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Inal Bersekov is an incredibly talented tattoo artist from Belgium whose black and white, photo-realistic tattoos look printed on the skin of his clients.

There are plenty of celebrated tattoo artists in the world today, each with their own unique styles, but when it comes to inking detailed portraits, you probably won’t find anyone better than Inal Bersekov. The quality of his works is so insane that it’s nearly impossible to tell that you’re looking at someone’s tattoo, and not a black and white photo, or a really good hyper-realistic drawing.

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Jono Dry is only 28-years-old and has never taken art classes, but his incredible talent allows him to create these photographic quality drawings using only graphite pencils. The young South African artist is considered one of the few people in the world able to take drawing pat the limits of what is considered achievable with simple graphite pencils.

Jono spends most of his time working on his large-scale drawings, and usually takes about 2-3 months to complete a piece, but he once spent a whopping 5 months painstakingly drawing one of his most complicated artworks. Considering how incredible the result of his labor ends up looking and the fact that he only produces between 4 and 8 large-scale drawings per year, Jono Dry’s hand-drawn masterpieces are considered very exclusive among collectors.

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Jacqui Kenny has always wanted to travel the world, meet new people and discover different cultures, but she suffers from agoraphobia – an anxiety disorder characterized by fear of public spaces, public transportation, open spaces and/or large crowds – so she rarely gets to leave her house. Luckily, modern technology allows her to live out her dream, sort of.

Jacqui was diagnosed with agoraphobia 8 years ago, but she has been dealing with extreme anxiety and panic attacks for over 20 years now. Last year was a particularly trying time, as a company  that she had co-founded for many years had just closed, and dealing with the stress of it, on top of her mental issues, was tough. She didn’t know what she was going to do with her life, and leaving the house to face the world was not an option. She needed something to keep her busy, and somehow, she discovered Google Street View.

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Noel Cruz, a Filipino-American artist based in Anaheim, specializes in repainting mass-produced celebrity and character dolls, like those made by Mattel, into hyper-realistic miniature models of the people that inspired them. The results of his meticulous work are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Born and raised in Manila, the Philippines, Noel Cruz has been drawing and painting people’s faces for most of his life. It all started when he was 12 years old, when, while looking through a neighbor’s window, he saw a telecast of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant on television. Seeing so many beautiful faces all at once inspired him to start drawing portraits on pieces of paper. At age 16, having undergone no specialized training, Cruz was already selling portraits as commissioned work. But he only discovered the fascinating world of repainted dolls several years later, after emigrating to the United States with his family.

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Some people are just born with an insane amount of talent. Take 31-year-old Nikola Čuljić, a self-taught artist from Serbia. He has been actively drawing for only three years, yet look at the wonders that he’s able to produce with some pencils, markers and pastels.

People had always told Nikola Čuljić that he had a talent for drawing, but he just wasn’t very interested in it. Then, three years ago, he decided to give it a shot, so he started drawing ultra-realistic portraits. That turned out to be very hard, and the young artist realized that he wasn’t very good at it, or, at least not as good as he wanted to be. Čuljić wanted to be the best, and anything less than that just didn’t satisfy him, so he decided to try something different. And that’s how he got into hand-drawn 3D illusions.

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The latte art scene in Korea is growing at an astonishing rate, and young Lee Kang Bin is one of the talented baristas spearheading the movement. The masterful designs he is able to freehand on cups of latte have earned him tens of thousands of fans on Instagram as well as a judge’s seat at numerous latte art competitions around the world.

Armed only with a thin metal rod and a palette of food dyes, Lee Kang Bin can turn a bland cup of latte into a stunning masterpiece. From drinkable recreations of famous paintings, like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, to detailed cartoon characters and portraits, there’s virtually nothing he can’t draw on milk foam.

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The word heliography usually refers to a photographic process invented in 1822, but Colorado-based artist Michael Papadakis has given it a new meaning after using it to describe his art of harnessing the sun to burn intricate artworks onto wooden panels with a magnifying glass.

Up until five years ago, Michael Papadakis used to create art the old fashioned way, with painting and drawing supplies, but on a trip along the Silk Road from Asia to Europe, he discovered a new and ingenious tool – the magnifying glass.

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Seen from afar, the works of Turkish artist Çağatay Odabaş look like large-scale printed movie posters, but as viewers approach them to take a closer look, they discover that they are actually made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny hand-drawn circles.

37-year-old Odabaş says that his art is largely influenced by his two most favorite activities growing up in the 80s and 90s – playing with LEGO bricks and watching movies. He starts out by picking out the movie stills he wants to recreate from his collection of thousands of films, which he considers his research library. He then proceeds to split this image into several pieces, mapping out each one with tiny circles, which are all assigned a certain code, to serve during the coloring process. Then, like a complicated but fascinating LEGO model, he puts all the pieces together to create these ultra-realistic masterpieces of pointilism.

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Nikita Golubev, aka ProBoyNick, is a talented illustrator from Moscow, Russia, who experiments with a variety of mediums, the most interesting of which is definitely dirt-covered cars in the Russian capital.

Proving that one man’s filthy car is another’s canvas, Golubev unleashes his artistic talents on dirt-covered cars he finds around Moscow, beautifying them with detailed landscapes, animal portraits and religious quotes that he scribbles into the layer of filth using his finger. It definitely beats having someone write “wash me” on your dirty car.

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Inspired by Charles and Francis Darwin’s theory on plant intelligence, German artist Diana Scherer managed to successfully coerce the roots of various plants to grow in specific patterns. The results of her work are simply breathtaking.

In his book, The Power of Movements of Plants, Charles Darwin argued that while plants are not capable of moving from the place where they are rooted, their roots don’t just grow passively, but actively observe their surroundings, navigating in search of water and certain chemicals. He also refers to roots as plants’ brain-like organ, suggesting that they are actually a lot more intelligent than most people think.

Based on Darwin’s controversial “root-brain” hypothesis, Amsterdam-based artist Diana Scherer conducted an artistic experiment where she attempted to coerce plant roots to grow in intricate patterns, sometimes becoming interwoven into stunning living carpets.

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Arinze Stanley is a talented young Nigerian artist whose works often leave people scratching their heads and asking themselves if they’re looking at a pencil drawing or a high-definition black and white photograph. Yes, his drawing skills are that good!

Arinze’s interest in art, and drawing in particular, was sparked at a young age, primarily by the fact that he was always surrounded by paper. His family ran a paper company, so he would often kill time by grabbing a piece of paper and trying his hand at drawing. But he only started exploring hyper-realism in 2012, and became a professional artist a year later. He has never taken any professional art classes, and claims that the level of detail he is able to produce is solely the result of years of practice. Looking at his fantastic artworks, it’s safe to say that he has come a long way in very little time.

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On January 22, 1977, 24-year-old P.K. Mahanandia set out on a four-month bicycle ride from Delhi, India, to Boras, Sweden, to be with the woman he knew was his soulmate. Their amazing love story became the subject of a best-selling book by Swedish author Per J. Andersson.

Mahanandia met Charlotte Von Schedvin in 1975, completely by chance. He was working as a sketch artist in Connaught Place, a shopping and business hub in Delhi, and Ms. Von Schedvin, from Sweden, was visiting India as a tourist. One day, as she was walking around the city, she noticed a curly young man with a sign that read “a portrait in 10 minutes for 10 rupees” and decided to test the claim. She sat down for a portrait, but something made the man nervous, as his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Disappointed with the result of his drawing but intrigued by the man, she decided to return the next day for a new one, but the result was no better.

The Swedish tourist would later learn that P.K. Mahanandia had very good reason for being nervous. The moment he had laid eyes on her, the artist remembered a prophecy his mother had made when he was only a boy. Mahanandia was a Dalit, the lowest caste in Indian society, and faced discrimination from upper-caste students growing up, so whenever he was said, his mother would tell him that he would someday marry a woman “whose zodiac sign would be Taurus, she would come from a far away land, she would be musical and would own a jungle”. As soon as he saw her, he knew she was the one.

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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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Vladimir Chaika, a pensioner from the Ukrainian city of Kiev, spent 15 years turning the staircase of his Communist era apartment building into an artistic masterpiece reminiscent of 17th and 18th century chateaus.

Vladimir says that he had always been fascinated by the interior design style of 1600s and 1700s castles and estates, and having worked in constructions for many years, repairing various structures around Kiev, he had the skill and experience needed to undertake such a complicated project. It was time that he lacked, but following an accident that left him clinically dead in 1997, he was forced to retire and ended up with a lot of free time on his hands. He was very familiar with the decorating style of 17th century French chateaus, construction materials were cheap, and after asking a friend to supply him with a variety of custom molds, he was ready to get to work.

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