Self-taught nail artist Vivian Xue Rahey uses tiny brushes to create ultra-realistic portraits of pop-icons and celebrities on acrylic nails.

Looking at some of Vivian Xue Rahey’s tiny masterpieces, you’d think she has been practicing acrylic nail painting for most of her life, but you would be mistaken. She only started doing nail art to decompress while working to launch her own tech company. The trained software engineer had just launched a software startup, when she took the hobby of nail painting as a way to relax but ended up going so deep down the rabbit hole that she decided to abandon her career in the tech world and become a professional fake nail artist instead. And the rest is history!

Read More »

Kurt Wenner, a former NASA illustrator turned professional artist, specializes in chalk-drawn three-dimensional illusions that seem carved into the pavement rather than drawn on it.

Born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, Kurt Wenner attended both the Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center in Pasadena and was quickly recruited to work for NASA while studying at the Art Center. There, he was among the few highly skilled artists whose work was done solely by hand. Eventually, Kurt eft the agency and moved to Europe to study some of the world’s greatest works of art. Disappointed to find no class on the principles of classicism, the young artist came up with his own self-learning program which involved spending countless hours drawing from the magnificent art collection of the Vatican Museums and the Pantheon.

Read More »

Julia Popova, a talented soap maker based in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, creates amazingly detailed bars of soap that look like delectable desserts, liquor bottles or juicy fruits.

Nine years ago, when Julia started making her beautiful soap bars, she only made them as gifts for family and friends, but she received such positive feedback that she actually started showing them off on social media. And soon, orders started coming in and the OmNon Soap brand was born. In the beginning, she would buy regular soap bars, melt them, and them mold them into the desired shapes, but as she became more involved in the artistic process, she started buying the base ingredients and then making her own soap. Well, calling it soap doesn’t do it justice, as every one of her creations is more like a piece of art.

Read More »

Talented Nigerian artist Patrick Onyekwere creates stunning, emotionally-charged portraits that look more like photographs than ballpoint pen drawings.

Living and working in Lagos, Nigeria, Patrick Onyekwere started drawing professionally in 2015 and has since become one of the world’s leading ballpoint pen drawing masters. A fan of Kelvin Okafor, himself an accomplished hyperrealist artist specializing in pencil portraits, Onyekwere is able to capture and convey the emotions and feelings of his models like no one else. He actually has an entire selection process that starts with inviting subjects to talk about their lives and their culture, before taking a few snapshots of them for reference.

Read More »

Calgary-based sculptor Jeff de Boer has made a career out of creating intricate metal suits of armor for cats and mice.

“It all started with a mouse,” Jeff de Boer recalls. He was looking for a creative way to combine his longtime passion for medieval armor with his trade as a jeweler and one day it simply dawned on him – he could make a tiny suit of armor for a mouse. It seemed like an interesting idea at the time, but he had no idea he would go on to become known as the world’s first and only animal armorer and create over 500 suits of armor for mice and cats.

Read More »

Sandry Riffard is a talented tattoo artist from France who specializes in macabre hyperrealism with a three-dimensional layer.

We’ve featured some amazing tattoo art over the last 15 years, from titans of the trade like Arlo DiCristina and Karol Rybakowski, to talented newcomers carving out their own niches, like Eduardo “Duda” Lozano or Mexican artist Yatzil Elizalde, but when it comes to hyperrealistic macabre tattoos, it’s tough finding someone better. The French artist has always had a thing for horror-inspired art, but he has come so far in the last few years, setting himself apart from other practitioners of the style with some incredible projects.

Read More »

UK-born artist Jonny Hall is famous for being one of the first tattoo artists to introduce UV-reactive ink to the style of black-and-grey realism.

UVealism, a term coined by Hall himself, basically refers to the enhancement of already-impressive black-and-grey realist tattoos with the ethereal glow of UV-reactive ink. In plain light, UV tattoos are semi-invisible, but put them under an ultraviolet black-light bulb and you get to see a whole new dimension of the design. UV-reactive ink is a bit more difficult to work with than normal tattoo ink, because it’s a lot thinner, but when used correctly, the results are awe-inspiring.

Read More »

Ethiopian-born artist Natnael Mekuria specializes in stunning celebrity portraits cracked into panes of glass using only a chisel and hammer.

22-year-old Natnael Mekuria discovered cracked glass art during the Covid-19 pandemic, but mastering the unusual art form took a lot of time and patience. In the beginning, he lacked the hand control necessary to keep the glass canvas from shattering, so he would spend hours chiseling at it only to have it break into pieces before finishing. But he didn’t give up, and today he is able to turn simple panes of laminated glass into beautiful works of art. He still spends hours on end painstakingly chiseling at the glass, but the end results are much different than when he first started.

Read More »

Nigerian artist Alex Peter Idoko uses fire, razorblades and sandpaper to create stunningly-realistic portraits that look more like sepia-toned photos.

Pyrography, or painting with fire, is an intriguing art form that involves the decoration of a wooden canvas with burn marks resulting from a controlled flame or heated instrument, like a poker. It’s a less forgiving art than traditional painting, as mistakes are much harder to fix or hide due to the destructive nature of fire. However, some artists control the unusual medium so well that they can create photo-quality artworks that are almost indistinguishable to the naked eye.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

Ruben Jordan Langsted is a talented tattoo artist who specializes in photo-realistic black & grey tattoos with high contrast and soft shadows.

Born in Norway but currently working out of the Dropout Collective tattoo shop in Copenhagen, Denmark Ruben Jordan Langsted is regarded as one of the world’s best tattooers when it comes to realistic black & grey tattoos. He claims that he only does this style of tattoo simply because he’s “not good at anything else,” but according to other sources, he does it because it is such a technically demanding style that no matter how good you get, there is always room for improvement. Looking at some of his black & grey artworks inspired by classic sculptures and artistic interior design, it’s hard to believe he could do any better.

Read More »

Latvian artist Marite Desaine specializes in beautiful ballpoint pen drawings that can easily be mistaken for elaborate paintings.

In the right hands, the humble ballpoint pen can be an amazing art tool, and we have featured some pretty amazing ballpoint drawings in the past, but nothing quite like the artworks of Marite Desaine. The Latvian artist first took the internet by storm with her awe-inspiring drawings back in 2014, soon after graduating from art school, when a number of prestigious art websites and blogs picked up her work. And for good reason, her style was unique, and the artworks – mostly landscapes – looked more like colorful paintings than drawings.

Read More »

Daisuke Samejima is a talented Japanese artist whose amazing spherical paintings look like the view through a fish-eye lens, regardless of the angle you see them from.

Painting a hyper-realistic rendition of an object, animal or human is difficult enough, but imagine doing it on a spherical canvas instead of a flat one. Apart from making sure that everything looks real to the untrained eye, the artist needs to consider the warping necessary to make everything look perfect regardless of what angle the sphere is viewed from. To be honest, photos just don’t do Daisuke’s art justice, so it’s a good thing we also have videos of them…

Read More »

Lithuanian artist Toma Skabeikyte uses body paint and makeup to turn her own body into various optical illusions.

Toma Skabeikyte, a 32-year-old makeup artist and body painter extraordinaire, has been getting a lot of attention on social media for her intriguing optical illusions. Using her own body as a canvas, Skabeikyte, who hails from Akmene, in Lithuania, spends hours creating all sorts of surreal designs inspired by anything from films to videogames and other artworks.

Read More »

Sergey Artemyev is a Russian artist who specializes in oil on canvas and pastel on canvas paintings, including some of the best optical illusions we’ve ever seen.

When creating painted replicas of real-life objects, depth and thickness are some of the toughest things to pull off, which makes sense, as creating painted renditions of three-dimensional objects is anything but easy. Still, we’ve some pretty impressive optical illusions in the past, so it’s definitely doable, but few can do it better than Sergey Artemyev. The Russian artist is so confident in his ability to paint hyperrealistic replicas of various objects that he places them right next to his artworks and you still can’t tell which one is real.

Read More »