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.

Photo: Alessandro Paglia/Instagram

“When I left my job and started to draw, I still wasn’t sure if my works would be appreciated or recognized as good art, and eventually be purchased,” the artist told Design Wanted. “I started drawing in a small gatehouse I was allowed to use for a couple of months. I opened my Instagram page and started posting my stuff.”

Paglia never wanted to go the usual gallery route, instead he was more interested in an independent journey powered by the internet, so when he was approached by the editor of TheCoolHunter, a large online magazine, who wanted to represent him, he jumped at the opportunity. He has been harnessing the power of the internet ever since.

Inspired by photography and fascinated by shadows, reflections, Alessandro Paglia starts his creative process by photographing his subjects tens of times in order to obtain the perfect shot, which he then begins to reproduce, on coarse-grain cotton paper, with fine point pencils. Each of his amazing drawings takes between 50 and 250 hours of work.

From metallic sculptures that reflect light and shadow and dripping designs that appear to have been digitally-rendered, to vintage objects and car models, Alessandro Paglia’s portfolio is impressively vast. Yet every one of his artworks looks more like a photograph than a pencil drawing.

For more hyper-realistic pencil drawings, check out the masterpieces of Yuki Kudo, and the mind-blowing sketches of Kohei Ohmori.