Oregon-based artist Natalie Fletcher is an expert at turning human bodies into optical illusions. Her artworks may seem cleverly photoshopped, but the illusions are in fact painted directly on to the skin!

Her project, aptly named ‘Just an Illusion’, features human canvases that are painted in bright base colors like cyan, fuchsia, yellow and green. She cleverly makes use of black contour lines to fool the eye into thinking that parts of the model’s torso are distorted. Some of them appear twisted, while others seem to have a gaping sinkhole in the center. She creates the illusion of depth by shading and positioning the lines.

Fletcher began her career as a body painter a few years ago, after getting into it by accident. She graduated from art school and then moved to Bend, Oregon, where she was looking for a job. That’s when she came across an ad for a body painter and landed the position.

Since then, she’s spent hours developing her skills. Although she’s been painting since childhood, she suddenly found that she liked the interactive and dynamic experience of painting on a human body. So she steadily honed her craft, and was recently the winner of the TV Show Skin Wars. She’s also the brains behind a body art project called 100 Bodies Across America.

Photos: Natalie Fletcher/Facebook

via Neatorama