Self-educated artist Cristina Penescu creates wildlife-themed scratchboard artworks that look so real it’s hard to believe they’re not photographs.

It’s not often I get to cover the works of fellow Romanians, but I guess that’s what makes it so special. Cristina Penescu was born in 1988, in Bucharest, but her family relocated to California when she was only a year old. Her love for art and nature began during her early childhood and stuck with her through her youth, but it was only in August 2009, at the age of 20 that she started focusing on promoting her wildlife artworks and making a name for herself in the art community.

“I work in a highly realistic style because I believe that nature’s beauty lies in it’s tiny details that are often overlooked, such as the moist, leathery texture of a nose or the bent, loose hairs in an animal’s seemingly immaculate pelt.” Cristina says about her art. The scratchboard, a relatively rare medium in the art world, allows her to achieve the level of detail she thinks is necessary to fully appreciate the beauty of nature. A scatchboard is a 1/8″ masonite panel covered with smooth white clay and coated with thin layer of india ink. Using a sharp knife, Penescu scratches each detail and hair strand by hand creating photo-like wildlife masterpieces. A single one of her scratchboards artworks can be made up of tens of thousand of tiny scratches layered atop one another.

Cristina Penescu’s scratchboard animal works are definitely some of the most impressive I’ve seen since writing about Paul Lung’s amazing pencil drawings. Keep making us proud, Cristina!

Cristina Penescu via My Modern Metropolis