Japanese artist Kei Meguro is known for her incredibly detailed portraits created mainly with pencil and graphite, which blur the line between drawing and black-and-white photography.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Kei discovered the joy of drawing at an early age, and she was encouraged to explore her talent by her family. In 2006, she entered the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduated in 2010 with a BFA in graphic design. In 2012, after working as a graphic designer at a major advertising agency in the US, she became an independent artist, and in 2016, she published her first portrait book aptly titled ‘Faces’. She has been one of the most highly-regarded portrait artists ever since, scoring collaborations with big-name brands like Adobe, HBO or Tiffany & Co., and also finding great success on social media. 

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Mayor Olajide, a 19-year-old artist from Nigeria, has taken the hyperrealistic art world by storm with his photo-realistic charcoal pencil portraits.

We’ve featured some really gifted hyperrealism artists on Oddity Central over the years, true masters like Anna Halldin Maule, Hirothropologie, or Dru Blair, but it’s rare to see that kind of talent in someone as young as 19. And yet, here is Mayor Olajide, a 19-year-old Nigerian artist who has been attracting attention with his hyperrealistic pencil drawings for at least a couple of years now. He apparently started drawing when he was only 5 years old, and by age 15, he was already selling his art pieces and taking commissions to contribute to the family budget. Today, he is considered one of the world’s most promising hyperrealists.

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When it comes ultra-realistic pencil drawings, you’d have a hard time finding someone better than Italian industrial designer turned artist Alessandro Paglia.

Having studying design at Politecnico di Milano, Alessandro Paglia managed to secure a job at 3M, working its first  international Design Center for five years. He then moved to a light design company and then to a brand design agency, but eventually realized that it wasn’t what he wanted to do in life. He had always been more fascinated by the artistic side of design, and his career was steering him further away from that. So one day Alessandro quit his job and decided to focus exclusively on artistic drawings, and we’re glad he did, because otherwise we would have probably never gazed upon his shiny masterpieces.

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Shaun Mckenzie, who goes by the name of NeeYellow on social media, is an insanely-talented artist who specializes in hyper-realistic color pencil drawings that look like photographs.

The young Australian artist spends anywhere from 60 to 80 hours creating his photorealistic masterpieces, and looking at the degree of detail in some of his works it’s easy to see why he spends so much time on them. To be fair, that is just the average time required to complete a drawing; he has finished some in as “few” as 15 hours, but he has also spent over 280 hours on one of his drawings. It’s painstaking, laborious process that requires mountains of patience is what I’m trying to say.

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Emanuele Dascanio is a super-talented artist whose graphite and charcoal pencil drawings look like high-resolution black-and-white photographs.

Looking at some of 37-year-old Emanuele Dascanio’s masterpieces, it’s easy to see why he sometimes takes hundreds of hours to complete a single piece. He often works 12 to 14 hours a day, often sacrificing his private life for art, but he sees it as an investment, if he sows a lot today, he’ll have more results to harvest in the future. The level of detail he is able to achieve using simple pencils is mind-blowing, making it easy to understand why is considered one of the most gifted hyperrealists of this generation.

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