Looking at the tattoos of Mexican artist Yatzil Elizalde, your first reflex is to squint, thinking there is something wrong with your eyes, but it’s just the artist’s unique ‘blurry effect’ style playing tricks on you.

Coming up with a unique tattooing style usually requires a lot of experience and confidence, so it was really surprising for us to learn that the creator of these stunning double vision tattoos was only 25-years-old. Even more surprising was the fact that she had started out as a visual artist, before taking up tattooing six years ago and opening her own studio in Hermosillo, Mexico’s Sonora state.

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Johannes Stötter is a world-renowned body-painter whose artworks are so incredibly realistic most people would never guess they are actually made up of people contorted in just the right positions and photographed from the right angle.

We originally featured the magical body-paintings of Johannes Stötter back in 2014, when he made international news headlines with a mind-blowing project where he turned two of his models into almost perfect Ara macaws. sitting on a branch. He has been keeping busy since then, coming up with all sorts of stunning compositions, from a near-perfect frog made up of several painted human models, to a single person posing as perfectly-detailed butterfly sitting on a sunflower. But, as always, even knowing the secret of Stötter’s art, you still have to squint to make out the people hidden in the artworks.

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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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A young art teacher from China’s Shanxi Province was recently praised online for spending three months working on a detailed chalk rendition of a traditional masterpiece.

When Zhao Wenrui, an art teacher in Fanzhi County, decided to draw a chalk version of Along the River during the Qingming Festival he just wanted to do something interesting for his students, to surprise them when they cam e back from the coronavirus quarantine. He certainly didn’t set out to use eight chalkboards side by side, five buckets of chalk and work on it for no less than three months, but then he found himself unable to ignore any of the details depicted in the treasured panoramic artwork.

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Akie Nakata describes herself as a “stone artist”, but there is more to her craft than simply painting river stones into familiar animal shapes. Every one of her pieces goes through a complex process that begins with choosing the right stone and continues with bringing out the life in it.

The Japanese artist, who goes by Akie on social media, has a very special way of looking at looking at stones. While most of us choose to ignore them, she considers them similar to living organisms, in that there is a rich history behind them and they all have a story to tell. She is just someone enabling that story to come out with her paintbrush. She believes that every stone she chooses in turn chooses her, giving her the ok to paint what she sees on it. Akie feels that her art is a collaborative effort of hers and the stones’, and she always shows her respect by never altering or processing a stone to better suit her design.

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We originally featured the amazing ballpoint pen drawings of Portuguese artist Samuel Silva back in 2021, but he has been buys over the last eight years, and I though we’d take a look at what he’s been up to.

Looking at some of Silva’s incredibly realistic artworks, it’s clear why many consider him the no. 1 ballpoint pen artist in the world. The photo-like level of detail in his masterpieces is simply uncanny, making it hard to believe that he is a self-taught artist who never went to art school. He started drawing when he was 2-years-old, and developed his own style and technique by creating “simple classroom sketches in the back of exercise books”. A lawyer by by training, Samuel Silva doesn’t create new works as often as other artists, but when he does, you better believe it’s something special.

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London-based Ben Koracevic is a young, self-taught string artist determined to push the boundaries of the art form. Looking at the insanely detailed portraits he is able to create using only black string and expertly placed nails, I’d say he has already succeeded.

Using thousands of nails carefully positioned on a blank white canvas, and pieces of string with a collective length of over one kilometer, Ben Koracevic spends dozens of hours painstakingly recreating iconic portraits of celebrities, movie characters and even animals. The level of detail in his works is simply uncanny considering the materials he works with.

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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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Drawing something even close to resemblig art is hard enough to do with one hand, but doing it with both hands, at the same time, sounds downright impossible. That only makes this amateur artist’s skills that much more impressive.

Colin Darke, a lawyer and amateur artist from Detroit, has been getting a lot of attention lately for his ability to draw detailed artworks with both hands at the same time, often using different colors in each to highlight his ambidextrous technique. From portraits of celebrities, iconic film characters, animals an nature-inspired scenes, there’s nothing he 42-year-old can’t draw with his hands simultaneously. After keeping his skill a secret for most of his life, the amateur artist only recently started posting photos and clips showcasing his ambidextrous talents on Instagram, after being inspired by a motivational speaker.

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The pencil drawings of Enrique ‘Kike’ Bernal would look good enough with that mysterious, colorful glow, but there is no denying that the added effect makes them that much more intriguing.

The young Mexican artist usually relies on mechanical pencils and pens to create his cartoonish drawings, but he recently incorporated a new, digital tool into his arsenal – Medibang Paint, an app that allows him to add artificial lighting to his drawings. He still has to make clever use of the colorful, almost fluorescent glow to nail the effect perfectly, so it’s not like anyone ca use it to create the same style of artworks. The mysterious glow only adds an extra layer of creativity to Bernal’s already excellent sketches and add a modern twist the to centuries-old art of portrait sketching.

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Warped or cracked furniture isn’t ideal, unless it’s that way by design, which is exactly what makes the whimsical cabinets of Henk Verhoeff so special.

The retired carpenter from Auckland, in New Zealand, went viral the other day, after his daughter started posting pictures of his amazing wooden cabinets on Facebook. At first glance, they look digitally altered to create the illusion of cracks or warps, but in reality they are designed and executed that way by hand. And what makes his creation even more special is that they continue to remain functional, despite their apparent defects; the drawers all open and close, and despite the reduced space, thousands have declared their willingness to pay just to have one of Henk Verhoeff’s wooden wonders in their homes.

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Colombian artist Diana Beltran Herrera creates incredibly realistic bird sculptures by carefully attaching bits of colored paper.

To say Diana Beltran Herrera’s hands are super-precise instruments would be an understatement. The talented artist uses her innate dexterity and years of practice to create amazingly-detailed models of various birds, from the common sparrow to tropical parrots, out of bits of glued paper. To represent the birds as they are in nature, Herrera makes her sculptures life-size. Over the last decade, she has created paper sculptures of hundreds of bird species.

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It’s hard saying goodbye to your favorite pair of jeans, even when they’re way beyond wearable, but English artist Ian Berry has found a way to avoid throwing away denim, by using it to create beautiful works of art.

Netherton-born artist Ian Berry, aka Denimu, has made quite a name for himself after his unique art took the art world by storm. It’s hard to believe the idea of using old denim as medium for his art came after a call from his mother, Christine, asking him to clean out his room.: “It was about six or seven years ago my mum was clearing out my old room and she wanted me to go through my things. I found loads of old jeans and denims and I noticed the different colors and shades. I kept hold of them but it was only about 18 months later I began to do something with them.” Little did he know his experiment would soon make him and his denim art famous all over the world.

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When it comes to hyper-realistic drawing, cats and other felines must be among the most difficult things to pull odd due to their fur. Getting every strand just right requires a steady hand and mountains of patience, and that’s what makes Yuki Kudo’s artworks so damn special.

Over the past decade, we’ve posted some pretty impressive hyper-realistic artworks on this website, so it takes some thing special to catch our attention. However, the first time I laid eyes on the color pencil drawings of Japanese artist Yuki Kudo, they took my breath away. I still find myself staring at some of his masterpieces, looking for clues that it’s just a drawing and not some digitally enhanced photo or CGI graphic. Oh, and did I mention he is only 18 years old?

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Norwegian cake artist Caroline Eriksson recently went viral for an awe-inspiring sculpture of Groot made exclusively out of gingerbread, but few people know that this is only the latest of her now traditional Christmas gingerbread masterpieces.

Everything started just before Christmas of 2013, when Caroline Eriksson showed off her edible Optimus Prime, a complex, edible sculpture made up of between 700 and 800 individual pieces of gingerbread. Photos of her very first gingerbread wonder got a lot attention on social media, particularly on Reddit, and even won Eriksson the grand prize of 40,000 NOK ($6,500) in a gingerbread contest. Since then, she has been dedicating all her free time in the two months leading up to Christmas every year to designing, baking and putting together the most amazing gingerbread sculptures.

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