Seen from afar, Craig Alan’s celebrity portraits seem made out of thousands of expertly placed paint dots, but as you draw nearer, you notice that those dots are actually tiny detailed human figures.

Craig Alan’s “Populous” series was inspired by a bird’s eye view from his mother’s 6th story condo, in Orange Beach, Alabama. He was watching the people down at the beach and photographing them when he noticed that their tiny figures forming patters. In one of his photos, the people appeared to have formed a eye, and the artist recalls that this was what first got his creative wheels turning. He started spray-painting tiny human figures on white canvases, positioning them in such a way that they and their shadows formed detailed portraits of some history’s most iconic personalities, from Michael Jackson to Marilyn Monroe.

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If you’re looking for someone to make a realistic, three-dimensional portrait of your pet cat using felt wool, you’ll have a tough time finding someone better than Wakuneco. Just have a look at what she can do with a needle and wool thread.

Looking at some of the feline portraits created by the talented Japanese artist, it’s hard to believe they are made of felted wool and not taxidermy masterpieces. To achieve this level o realism, Wakuneco – which translates as “frame cat” – spends hours on end poking at wool with a needle to create solid layers that mimic cat fur, applying realistic glass eyes and finally adding the whiskers. After everything is just as she wants it, the 3D portrait is framed and sent to the owner who commissioned it.

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Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

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Slovenian artist Sašo Krajnc creates incredibly detailed portraits by tightly winding a single sewing thread on a circular wooden frame to create overlapping straight lines.

That’s actually the most impressive thing about Sašo Krajnc, that he’s able to create such detailed facial features, like the curvatures of the eyes and lips, using only straight lines. He starts out with a circular frame made of wood or aluminium and lined with metal nails. He then takes a long sewing thread and begins winding it around these nails creating hundreds, or even thousands of black straight lines that crisscross and overlap to emphasise the features of his subjects.

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California-based artist Phil Vance spends hundreds of hours creating typography portraits of historical icons entirely out of handwritten words and phrases.

From afar, Phil Vance’s typography portraits look like expertly drawn artworks, but as you draw nearer to them, you start to see that every feature is actually made up of handwritten text. Once you start deciphering all the words, you realize they are famous quotes of the subject written over and over again. The talented artist describes his art as “cross-hatching but with words.”

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These lovely portraits may look like high-definition artistic photographs, or even the product of CGI, but they are actually oil paintings created by Japanese artist Yasutomo Oka

At just 34-years-old, Yasutomo Oka is quite obviously already a master when it comes to hyperrealistic paintings. The artist, who hails from Komaki, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, spends up to a month working on one of these masterpieces, making sure that they turn out as realistic as possible, and the result is almost always awe-inspiring.

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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 the artist over dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours, do you begin to understand the hard work and patience that go into each and every one of his stippled portraits.

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Hair is not the easiest art medium to work with, especially when you’re trying to create detailed portraits of people and animals, but young Indian artist Midhun R.R. had developed a technique that allows him to manipulate thousands of short hair strands into impressive artworks.

All Midhun needs to create his art is some hair, obviously, a white sheet of paper for canvas and a long needle to manipulate the tiny hairs. He makes the whole thing look easy in the time lapse videos he posts on YouTube, but admits that arranging the hairs the way he wants is actually harder than it seems. To make it easier for himself he has the hair chemically treated before using it. The hair strands are then cut at various lengths, depending on the image he is trying to create, and carefully arranged on the paper canvas using the needle. Once Midhun is satisfied with the result, the artwork is sandwiched between two glass panes for long-term preservation.

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Mario Hvala, a barber from Novi Sad, Serbia, recently made international headlines for trimming a detailed portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on the back of a client’s head, but that was only his most recent achievement. He has been creating “hair tattoos” for the last eight years, and there’s nothing he can’t trim on the scalps of his customers.

33-year-old Mario claims he started doing hair tattoos eight years ago, while working in Slovenia. A customer had asked him for two straight lines on his head, but the hairstylist was feeling adventurous, so he proposed a more intricate design, and the guy went home with a tarantula design on his head. Inspired by the success of his first attempt, Hvala kept honing his skills, and upon his return to Serbia, four years ago, he quickly made a name fr himself at the House Damian hair salon, in Novi Sad, carving all kinds of design and celebrity portraits on customers’ heads.

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Creating hyper-realistic animal portraits with a paintbrush or pencil is a difficult skill that only the world’s most talented artists can master, but doing it with just a needle and wool felt sounds downright impossible. That only makes “wool painter” Dani Ives’ work that much more impressive.

Looking at Dani Ives’ impressive portfolio of “wool paintings” it’s hard to believe that she only uses a barbed felting needle to manipulate colored strands of wool on a basic foam pad, in order to achieve such impressive results. The self-taught artist apparently developed her own technique, which involves pushing the colored wool through the base before pulling it back through, which helped her push the boundaries of this centuries-old art form.

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Allan Pachino Wallace is a young, talented artist from Nassau, the Bahamas, who recently rose to internet fame with a series of amazing celebrity portraits made only with salt, coffee or baking soda.

Wallace works with all kinds of mediums, from common oil paint and spray paint, to tree leaves and cereal. A quick look at his social media profiles on Facebook or Instagram reveals the versatility and talent of this young artist, but the internet only learned about it after he shared a salt portrait of actor/comedian Kevin Hart on his Facebook page. People loved it and got shared so much that Kevin Hart himself saw it and publicly congratulated Allan on his work.

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28-year-old Irakli Nadar is considered one of the most talented digital artists of our time. Using only digital painting tools, he is able to create photo-like portraits from scratch. His works are so good that many in the digital art world accuse him of simply applying various filters to digital photographs and passing them off as paintings.

You could say that Irakli Nadar’s amazing skill is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, his breathtaking artworks have brought him worldwide fame and legions of adoring fans on various social networks, but his success and enviable skill have also made him the target of criticism from both rival artists and the average internet trolls. Luckily, he has learned to live with both, and says that tough as it sometimes is, he just ignores the haters and focuses on the positive.

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26-year-old Kel Cruz, an artist from Quezon City, Philippines, is being hailed as a “pixel art wizard”, for his mind-blowing pixelated portraits created with everything from bits of scotch tape and matchsticks, to fingerprints and blood stains.

Cruz, who works as a male nurse, used to create pixelated art the old fashioned way, with a ballpoint pen. But then a rival artist challenged his artistic talent, accusing him that he was using a printer to create his detailed portraits. That inspired him to stop relying so heavily on conventional tools and start exploring unusual mediums. Since then, he has used lipstick, colored tape, rubber stamps, beer and even woven pieces of paper to create some truly awe-inspiring masterpieces.

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Most of us have trouble painting something decent on the largest of canvases, but true artists can unleash their talent on pretty much anything, even leaves. Case in point, Indian artist Sandesh S. Rangnekar, who paints detailed works of art on fragile skeleton peepal leaves.

Rangnekar learned the ancient art of peepal leaf painting from his father, acclaimed artist Sadashiv G. Rangnekar. Fascinated by his father’s skills, Sandesh started sneaking into his art studio when he was 10-years-old and slowly but steadily mastered the traditional art form. He always made sure to leave the studio before his father came home, so he had no clue of his son’s artistic talent, and the first time Sandesh shared one of his early works with him, he was impressed. So much so that he encouraged the boy to use his paints and brushes from then on, which Sandesh says gave him a huge confidence boost.

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Looking at the detailed leopard portrait below, you’d be inclined to think Franziska Treptow is a photographer. Every detail, from the tiny hairs of the animal’s fur to the reflection in its eyes, is so perfect that it’s almost impossible to believe that the young German artist paints or draws every one of her artworks.

Franziska’s ideas start as sketches and photos of wildlife. Using her skills in digital photo manipulation technology (Photoshop), she creates a digital model for her works, which helps her become aware of the composition and accentuation of light and shadow. She then sketches that model on paper or canvas and uses pencils or paints to create the ultra-realistic animal portraits exclusively by hand. The whole process, can take anywhere from a few hours to more than a month, depending on the complexity of the project. The end result is always breathtaking.

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