Don’t Trust Your Brain, It Only Looks Real

It’s hard to believe, but the bag of potato chips you’re looking at right now isn’t real, it’s just an expertly drawn optical illusion. Twitter user Shinoo (@ Shinoo_0215) has been getting a lot of attention this week thanks to his incredibly detailed color pencil drawings. Actually, calling his artworks “detailed” is a bit of […]
The Photolike Ballpoint Pen Portraits of Oscar Ukonu

Nigerian artist Oscar Ukonu is a master of the ballpoint pen. He wields the writing tool with such precision and skill that he is able to draw artworks that cannot be distinguished from high-resolution photographs. The self-taught artist started drawing when he was nine-years-old, but only got into hyperrealistic art during his time in architecture […]
Insanely-Talented Artist Hand-Paints Picture-Perfect Portraits of Women

German artist Philipp Weber specializes in hyper-realistic paintings of female models which can hardly be distinguished from high-resolution photographs at first glance. Born in 1974 in Rostock, Germany, Philipp Weber showed an inclination for the arts when he was only three-years-old, and continued to impress both his parents and his art teachers as he grew. […]
The Photo-Like Ballpoint Pen Portraits of Samia Al Homsi Dagher

Samia Al Homsi Dagher, a software engineer and illustrator from Lebanon, has made a name for herself by creating stunningly realistic ballpoint pen portraits. From celebrities to commission portraits of everyday people, this talented artist’s artworks are sometimes hard to tell apart from photographs. Born in 1987, the Tripoli-based artist started drawing when she was […]
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 […]
The Mind-Boggling Optical Illusions of Marcello Barenghi

Italian artist Marcello Barenghi has a very special skill – he can draw hyper-realistic versions of everyday objects, using commons drawing tools to make them look three-dimensional. Even as a child, Marcello Barenghi had a knack for hyper-realistic drawing, trying his hardest to imitate reality. At just 18 months he was drawing airplanes that had […]
Artist Spends Hundreds of Hours Creating Amazing Portraits with Millions of Ink Dots

David Bayo, a self-taught artist from Strasbourg, France, spends hundreds of hours carefully placing tiny ink dots on a white canvas to create incredibly detailed portraits. To truly appreciate David Bayo’s skills, you need to lean in and examine his amazing artworks up close. Only when you see the millions of dots expertly placed by […]
Turkish Artist Recreates Iconic Movie Scenes Using Hundreds of Thousands of Tiny Colored Dots

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 […]
Chinese Barber Uses Leftover hair to Create Awe-Inspiring Artworks
Wang Xiaojiu, a 31-year-old barber from Jilin city, China, doesn’t simply sweep shorn hair off the floor of his hair salon and dump it in the trash. At least not before painstakingly arranging it to create highly detailed works of art. Seen from a far, Wang’s masterpieces look drawn with a pencil or charcoal, but […]
The Photo-Like Pencil Portraits of Shinichi Furuya
It never ceases to amaze me the kind of amazing things talented people can create using only the simplest of materials. Case in point, artist Shinichi Furuya, who uses pencils and paper to make these stunningly-realistic portraits of Japanese celebrities. The level of detail in Shinichi Furuya’s artworks is so breathtaking that it’s hard to believe […]
The Amazing Ballpoint Pen Portraits of Enam Bosokah
Using only a simple ballpoint pen, Ghana-based artist Enam Bosokah creates stunningly realistic portraits of prominent African personalities. “A lot of guys have already made their name using pencil, so I decided to use a pen,” Bosokah said in an interview with Anadolu Agency. “A lot of artists avoid pens because of the irreversibility (i.e., the inability to erase), […]
Artist Draws Insanely Detailed City Landscapes Entirely from Memory

Dutch artist Stefan Bleekrode has been blessed with the most amazing talent – he can draw amazingly detailed sketches of cities he has visited, using only his razor-sharp memory as reference . The 28-year-old has used his superhuman power of recollection to create ‘Cityscapes’, a series of sketches of some of the world’s most famous cities, […]
The Picture-Perfect Pencil Portraits of Natasha Kinaru

Natasha Kinaru is a beautiful, young Russian artist whose pencil and pastel drawings of celebrities are incredibly realistic. So realistic, that they are often confused with digitally ‘enhanced’ photographs. “I am inspired by people, so different, beautiful, interesting, mysterious, bright, talented,” said 21-year-old Natasha. “Drawing allows you to see them closer, try to guess the […]
The Voynich Manuscript, Also Known as World’s Most Mysterious Book

Featuring rudimentary depictions of plants illustrated in aged colors and written in a language system that has yet to be deciphered, The Voynich Manuscript is the world’s most mysterious book. In order to pay for the restoration of their college, the Italian Jesuits of Villa Mondragone gave Wilfrid Voynich, an antique book dealer, an old manuscript […]
The Incredibly Lifelike Charcoal Portraits of Douglas McDougall

Scottish artist Douglas McDougall uses charcoal, sandpaper and scalpel blades to create his amazingly realistic portraits of friends and people he finds interesting. Douglas McDougall learned how to draw as a child to pass the time while going in and out of hospitals with a blood disease. He spent countless hours in hospital wards trying […]