Portland-based tattoo artist Winston the Whale creates simple yet impressive 3D tattoos that make viewers feel like they are experiencing blurry vision.

Winston the Whale started making his signature 3D tattoos after a friend asked him if he could make a three-dimensional design for him. It ended up better than he’d hoped, so he kept making them. To be clear, the artist’s artworks aren’t really 3D, they just have that nostalgic red-and-blue color scheme and overlapping pattern that tricks the viewers’ eyes into thinking they are seeing double. Even though trippy, colorful tattoos are now his bread and butter, 3D tattoos still have a special place in Winston’s heart.

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Wild Drawing is a talented street artist who specializes in stunning 3D murals that turn transform bland structures into works of art.

Born in Bali, Wild Drawing, or WD for short, first got into street art in the year 2000 during his studies at the School of Fine Arts. He and his colleagues were often protesting school policies with large, intricate banners, and that made him realize that large images visible in the public space can have a big impact on society. A few years back, WD moved to Greece and he has been unleashing his artistic talent on the streets of Athens ever since. Drawing inspiration from nature, art, social phenomena, and even politics, Wild Drawings creates colorful compositions that always catch the eyes of passers-by.

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A 33-year-old artist from Chenzou, China, has been getting a lot of attention for turning trees, utility poles, and road signs into optical illusions that blend into their backgrounds.

Huang Yao is a talented 3D painter who showcases his skills by turning local infrastructure and plant life into original artworks. The young Chinese specializes in creating perfect camouflage for his creations, which makes them blend into the background perfectly. But that would mean that most people either walk right by them without even noticing his stunning work, or run straight into them and injure themselves. Neither case is ideal, so Huang usually adds certain elements to make his optical illusions stand out.

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Aria, a 25-year-old self-taught artist from Japan, specializes in 3D color pencil drawings that look ready to jump off of the sheet of paper they are drawn on.

Despite what your eyes are desperately trying to make you think, Aria’s works are all two-dimensional. She just has this innate ability to draw a variety of objects in great detail, and present them from an angle that creates the illusion that they are three-dimensional. Every one of her artworks takes hours to complete and consists of several layers of colored pencils, but the end result is definitely worth the work.

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Some people are just born with an insane amount of talent. Take 31-year-old Nikola Čuljić, a self-taught artist from Serbia. He has been actively drawing for only three years, yet look at the wonders that he’s able to produce with some pencils, markers and pastels.

People had always told Nikola Čuljić that he had a talent for drawing, but he just wasn’t very interested in it. Then, three years ago, he decided to give it a shot, so he started drawing ultra-realistic portraits. That turned out to be very hard, and the young artist realized that he wasn’t very good at it, or, at least not as good as he wanted to be. Čuljić wanted to be the best, and anything less than that just didn’t satisfy him, so he decided to try something different. And that’s how he got into hand-drawn 3D illusions.

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Brazilian artist João Carvalho may be only 15 years old, but his incredible talent more than makes up for his lack of experience. The young artist can completely transform plain paper into ruled notebook sheets with 3D illusions popping out of them.

He starts by drawing blue lines on a blank sheet, but distorts them and adds intense shadows at just the right places, adding depth to his dessigns and creating the effect of three dimensional shapes that seem to jump off the page.

Some of these shapes include popular characters like Homer Simpson, Scooby Doo, and Jerry the mouse. He also creates effects like ripples of flowing water and wrinkled paper.

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Argentinian street artist Eduardo Relero has the special talent of turning something as dull as pavements into incredible three-dimensional artworks that put people in danger of walking into lampposts starring at them.

48-year-old Eduardo Relero, who lives in Madrid, Spain, will spend up to two weeks working on one of his amazing 3D murals, which when viewed from the perfect angle look to be rising up from the pavement or sinking deeper into it. The talented artist began creating his beautiful artworks in 1990, on the streets of Rome, and has since then gone on to create breathtaking murals in Germany, France, Spain and America. “I realized that by taking my art out in the public, to festivals, theaters and events, I would be free to make drawings more to my liking, ” the artist says, adding that it’s also a great way of getting ideas across to big groups of people. With themes ranging from flying lions, giant waterfalls and gaping craters to giant feet sticking out of gaping holes in the ground and ancient figures lying in tombs that are actually just the tops of public benches, Relero seems to be one of those artists that never run out of ideas.

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21-year-old Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki creates amazing sketchbook drawings which viewed from the right angle create a realistic 3D illusion.

We’ve featured some pretty impressive three-dimensional art in the past, and young Hideyuki’s works are right up there with the best. Using a technique known as anamorphosis, the talented Japanese is able to create mind-boggling masterpieces that seem to come to life right out of his sketchbook. At 17, Nagai dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, but soon realized drawing comics wasn’t the thing for him. Then, three years later, he stumbled upon Julian Beever’s street art, and instantly fell in love with the idea of creating 3D artworks. Unfortunately, he discovered drawing on the streets of Japan was illegal, so he started looking for another way to exercise his talents. That’s how his intriguing sketchbook art was born.

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Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori paints incredibly realistic three-dimensional goldfish embedded in layers of transparent resin. His artworks look more like photos of actual fish swimming peacefully in their little tanks.

Riusuke Fukahori’s work could best be described as a a combination between painting and sculpture. The talented artist creates his “living masterpieces”using a complex process involving layers of cast resin and acrylic paint. He patiently builds up his fish, layer by layer, adding transparent resin to create a realistic three-dimensional effect. Despite the tedious and complex nature of the artistic process, the end results are highly dynamic, capturing the animated life of the fish.

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Ukrainian artist Daria Marchenko and her team were commissioned by a night-time delivery company to turn their dull-delivery points into something truly special, and the results are just fantastic.

Night Express, a courier service operating in the Ukraine, decided to remind their clients about their favorite fairytales, cartoons and childhood dreams, by turning delivery points in various Ukrainian cities into mind-blowing optical illusions. The fact that Night Express operates at night, when people dream, was the inspiration behind this amazing project carried out by Daria Marchenko and her team of gifted artists.

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German artist Heike Weber uses dozens of permanent markers to completely transform a dull space into a mesmerizing three-dimensional environment.

The artist starts out by drawing her loopy shapes on sheets of paper, then proceeds to making them permanent by repeating the process on a room’s floor, ceiling and walls, with markers. I can’t imagine how much patience you need to do all the drawing by hand, considering you’re pretty much tracing the same lines over and over again, but I guess that’s just one of the qualities that make Heike Weber a great artist. What’s even more impressive is some her installations are larger than 5,000 square feet.

Apart from using the marker’s colors, Weber’s technique allows her to control the white space between the lines, creating a three-dimensional world that somehow feels alive. I can’t imagine anyone being able to live in a space that seems to be constantly flowing around them, but if you can’t make up your mind about how to decorate your home, maybe you should try a permanent marker and unleash your artistic talent. This guy did it, and it turned out pretty darn amazing.

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“Lions Gate Gorge”, a giant 3D artwork created by artist Qi Xinghua has been acknowledged as the world’s largest 3D painting, by the Guinness Book of Records.

The amazing painting, located in front of a shopping mall in Guangzhou, China, measures an impressive 23 meters wide and 32 meters long, on the ground, while the wall in the background is 6 meters high. It covers an area of 892 square meters and looks so realistic that people say they actually get dizzy when walking on the painted ropes that traverse the colorful gorge.

Qi Xinghua, China’s first 3D painter, said the giant illusion took him a whole month of painstaking work to complete, but looking at the end result I’d say he doesn’t regret it for a moment. He was actually the holder of the previous record, a 3D painting measuring over 535 square meters, but his latest achievement beat that by 356 square meters.

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Mr. Hou is an average Joe who recently became popular thanks to a few photos of his chalk art being posted on Chinese forums.

The first photos of Mr. Hou’s 3D chalk art first appeared late last month, and Chinese netizens quickly gave him the nick name “Chalk God” and compared him to the architects from the sci-fi blockbuster Inception, for his ability to create unbelievably realistic-looking landscapes.

Because his works first appeared on a Chinese forum, his identity had to be dug-up by the media, and everyone was surprised to discover the talented chalk artist was just an average citizen who exercised his talents for the fun of his little boy. The humble Mr. Hou said he doesn’t believe his artwork are that impressive, but actually the ideas behind them.

Check out a video of Mr. Hou in action, at the bottom.

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These are some of the most realistic trompe l’oeil murals I have ever seen.

John Pugh has to be one of the most talented trompe l’oeil painters in the world. He creates unbelievably realistic murals that trick the viewer’s eye into seeing a three-dimensional scene. Pugh’s works can be seen all across the world, from New Zealand to Hawaii.

Photos by John Pugh/ BARCROFT

via Telegraph.co.uk