Looking at the expertly-drawn charcoal and graphite portraits of Dylan Eakin, you’d think he has a lifetime of experience and many years of art school under his belt, but the truth is he’s a self-taught artist and he’s only been at it for three years.

Staring at most of Eakin’s black-and-white portraits, I often found myself looking for any clues that I was looking at a drawing and not a high-definition photograph. That’s what hyperrealism is all about, I know, but the talented artist really takes it to the extreme, nailing even the finest of details, like loose strands of hair on his subjects’ faces, droplets of sweat or the smallest wrinkles. To the untrained eye, his works seem perfect, but he is the first to point out that there are some things he simply can’t replicate.

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Scottish artist Douglas McDougall uses charcoal, sandpaper and scalpel blades to create his amazingly realistic portraits of friends and people he finds interesting.

Douglas McDougall learned how to draw as a child to pass the time while going in and out of hospitals with a blood disease. He spent countless hours in hospital wards trying to draw his surroundings, and the experience fueled his passion for art. In his younger years, the 50-year-old artist used to do a lot of pen and ink illustration work during the night, after coming home from his day job, but eventually settled on charcoal as his medium of choice. “The immediacy of applying that blackness and the way in which it’s sucked into a white ground /paper/ forever excited me with a glorious kick of absoluteness”, the artist says, and after getting his hands on Conté compressed charcoal for the first time and discovering its power there was no going back. Today he uses various kinds of charcoal along with unusual art tools like sandpaper and sharp blades to create some of the most detailed hyper-realistic portraits I have ever seen.

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New York-based artist Robert Longo creates detailed charcoal drawings that look amazingly photo-like. If you thought your sketches were pretty good, wait till you see what this guy can do.

You know when you look at a photo and you say to yourself “this looks too good to be true”? Most of the time Photoshop is to blame, but Robert Longo decided to create his own black and white photographs, the hard way. Instead of a few mouse clicks, he uses charcoal, graphite and paper, spending hours-on-end to create incredibly realistic works of art. You don’t need to be an expert to figure out Longo is an exceptional artist, but he has captured the attention of the art world, and his works have been exhibited in galleries around the world.

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