This pencil portrait of an old man looks unbelievably realistic, down to the reflection in the pupils, and it’s hard to believe that it was actually drawn by a teenager. For her incredible masterpiece, 16-year-old artist Shania McDonagh won the top prize at this year’s Texaco Children’s Art Competition. She was judged the best in the senior age category, for students aged 16 to 18 years old.

Texaco Children’s Art Competition is an art contest held for kids in Ireland, every year since 1955. Shania, a student at Mount St. Michael Secondary School in Claremorris, has been taking part in the contest for the past four years. And you won’t believe this – she has won the first prize in her age category every single time. According to Professor Delan McGonagle, the chairman of the judging panel, Shania is a ‘young artist of exceptional skill and ability among the many talented artists in the competition.’ He also added that Shania’s work has established her as one of the most talented artists of her generation, whose skill could see her become one of Ireland’s foremost portrait artists of the future.

Read More »

Zaria Forman’s paintings of icebergs are so realistic that just looking at them actually gives me the chills. Her 2012 collection, Chasing the Light, is a tribute to her mother who died from brain cancer. She also hopes to raise awareness to climate change through her work.

Forman has a unique style of creating art. “When I travel, I take thousands of photographs and make small sketches. Once I am back in the studio, I draw from my memory of the experience, as well as the photographs to create large scale compositions. I add layers of color onto the paper, smudging everything with my fingers and hand,” she said.

Read More »

They may look like high-resolution photos of delicious foods, but these are actually incredibly detailed paintings by acclaimed hyper-realist artist Tom Martin. All of his pieces is a least one meter wide and can sell for up to £17,000 ($27,000).

We first discovered Tom Martin’s amazing artworks back 2010, when we featured some of his most impressive food-related paintings. The 26-year-old artist has been keeping himself busy in these last few years, creating new stunning masterpieces guaranteed to make viewers drool over them. Most of his works focus on food, but you might notice there aren’t any greasy burgers and pizzas displayed in his paintings. “I focus on food and its content because it plays a very big part in my life at the moment,” the artist explains. “I am a keen fitness enthusiast and along with that comes a healthy diet and the science of learning how your body uses carbohydrates and proteins.” You will however find bowls of delicious-looking fruit cereal, toast and marmalade, and even small guilty pleasures like waffles and ice-cream.

Read More »

Many of Simon Hennessey’s paintings look so lifelike that they are often mistaken for photos. To achieve this level of realism, the English artist spends anywhere from two weeks to seven months on a single piece using an airbrush and acrylic paint.

40-year-old Simon Hennessey started painting landscapes reflected in the sunglasses of tourists in 2008. He had just finished painting a model wearing sunglasses and suddenly realized the reflection on the lenses allowed him to explore the spatial and environmental surroundings in a unique distorted and miniature fashion. From that moment on the popular accessory has become a predominant them in his hyper-realistic art. Simon has spent the last five years traveling to big cities like London and New York, taking photos of iconic landmarks reflected in the lenses of sunglasses worn by human models, which he uses as an inspiration for his art. He doesn’t just copy an entire photograph, but combines elements from multiple reference pictures, adding or removing certain details, altering textures and depth to produce original works of art. This allows him to create an illusion of reality different from that of his photographic sources, making his realistic paintings appear clearer and more distinct than any photo.

Read More »

Eric Wilson is one of the world’s most talented wildlife artists. During the last 20 years, he has painted endangered animals in their natural habitats all over the globe using a variety of mediums, from oil paints to pastels.

Growing up in Scotland, Eric Wilson spent most of his childhood days roaming the highland mountains, where his love for nature and wildlife was born. He also displayed great artistic talent very early on, and in 1967 his art teacher confirmed “Eric has an artistic talent way beyond his years”. So you could say it was only natural that he would combine his his love of wildlife and passion for the arts to become a wildlife artist. Unlike many of his colleagues, who use photos as reference for their works, Eric has always believed observing the animals in their natural habitats with just the help of local guides was key to his art. Throughout the years, he has painted lions in South Africa, tigers in Nepal, clouded leopards in Thailand, rhinos in Zimbabwe, wolves in Alberta, chimpanzees in Burundi and even polar bears in the Canadian Arctic, always making sure he included all the correct flora and fauna to create a faithful depiction of the wild.

Read More »

Ruben Belloso Adorna, a young artist from Seville, Spain, has taken the art world by storm with his incredibly detailed portraits of real-life and fictional characters drawn exclusively in pastel on wooden canvas.

Painting hyper-realistic works of art with oil paints requires great talent and skill, but drawing them with pastel sticks and crayons seems almost impossible. It appears the word “impossible” is not in Ruben Belloso Adorna’s dictionary, as the young Spanish artist manages to create stunning photo-quality masterpieces using only pastels. Born in 1986, he studied Fine Arts at the University of Seville, and has already made a name for himself in the art world, participating in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and winning several awards. Looking at the quality of his colorful drawings, and the way he is able to bring out the emotions of his subjects, it’s easy to see why many are already calling Ruben a genius of the 21st century.

Read More »

Arizona-based Tom Eckert would be better off calling himself an illusionist rather than a sculptor. The talented artist somehow manages to turn hard wood into realistic looking objects, from flowing fabrics, to books and fruits.

It’s almost impossible to believe Tom Eckert uses traditional techniques to carve his amazing artworks from wood, but that’s just what makes him so special. Since childhood, I have been curious about and amused by mistaken impressions of reality presented as part of my visual experiences,” Tom says. “One of my earliest recollections, on a car trip, was my perception of the wet, slick highway ahead that turned out to be an illusion, a mirage.  The revelation that I was fooled, visually and intellectually tricked, stuck with me.  This visual deception is now the basis for my creative direction.  “Cloth” carved of wood has much different structural qualities than real cloth. When this idea is applied to my compositions (floating book, floating cards, floating rock) a sense of the impossible happens – for me, magic.” Not just for him, I’m sure.

Read More »

Nathan Walsh is an English realist painter who specializes in urban landscapes. He pays tribute to some of the world’s most beautiful cities, like New York, Chicago or London, through photo-realistic paintings of various urban locations.

Nathan is definitely not the only artist in the world who can create amazingly-realistic images using simple tools like a pencil and paintbrush, but the painstaking process he employs to reach his goal is very different from the way other hyper-realist masters work. Painters who use photographic sources for their artworks use a variety of techniques, including loose sketching of their subjects or transforming the canvas into a grid and painting box by box, but Nathan Walsh takes things to a whole new level by relying on elaborate drawings that look a lot like architectural blueprints to achieve the awe-inspiring level of realism visible in the images below. Before picking up the paintbrush, he draws up to 100 different sketches of a single urban scene, a time-consuming process that can take up to three or four months.

Read More »

Singapore-based artist Keng Lye uses his phenomenal sense of perspective to create incredibly realistic animals by painting in layers of epoxy resin and acrylic paint. His series, called Alive Without Breath, features stunning works that blur the line between what is real and what is not.

The time-consuming process used by Keng Lye to create his stunningly-realistic artworks involves filling bowls, buckets, and boxes with numerous layers of lye, and painting the detailed creatures with acrylics and epoxy resin. Each piece consists of several layers, and just one little mistake can compromise weeks, even months-worth of work. This laborious technique requires the utmost patience and attention to detail, but executed to perfection it gives the artwork great depth and an overall life-like look. The art of painting/sculpting in layers of lye was made famous by Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori, whose exceptional masterpieces we featured on Oddity Central in the past, but Keng Lye added his own unique touch by incorporating physical elements into his art pieces to make them look even more real. For his mind-blowing octopus he used a small pebble, and to make the turtle’s shell he made great use of an egg shell extruding from the resin. But even without these accessories, his fish and crustaceans look ready to jump out of the water.

Read More »

In this digital era, it’s amazing to see artists like Olga “Melamory” Larionova using a primitive tool like the graphite pencil to create stunning portraits that rival high-resolution black-and-white photographs.

I’ve always been fascinated by hyperrealist art, but the level of detail in Olga Larionova’s pencil artworks just blew me away. Getting every little feature and reflection just right with glossy paint is impressive enough, but doing it with a simple graphite pencil seems borderline impossible. Yet this young artist from Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod proves it can be done. The uber-talented Melamory has been drawing ever since she can remember. She started by coloring the drawings her mother used to create for her, and as the years went by she began drawing the shapes herself. You’d never guess by looking at her incredible creations, but Olga never went to art school. She did read some books on academic drawing and that helped her develop some basic techniques, but she thinks being a self-taught artist and not having to follow a strict set of rules has actually helped her develop her own unique style. Having graduated from the University of Architecture, Melamory now works as an interior designer, but hyperrealist art remains her greatest passion.

Read More »

They look like high-definition photos enhanced in Photoshop, but in reality Cheryl Kelley’s muscle-car inspired artworks are just really good hyper-realistic paintings. Using high-gloss oil paints the Texas-based artist  manages to capture the beauty of these iconic vehicles from a bygone era better than any camera ever could.

Cheryl Kelley has always been drawn to beautiful classic cars. During her childhood, she used to play with Hot Wheels toy cars and remembers being fascinated by their delicate curves. Now all grown up, Cheryl drives her very own 1977 Corvette, and has managed to make a name for herself in the art world by painting photo-realistic portraits of muscle cars. The talented artist finds her inspiration at classic car shows and museums, where she takes high-resolution photos of vintage Chevrolets, Camaros or Corvettes that she later uses as guidelines for her impressive creations. Working with glossy oil paints on aluminum panels, Kelley is somehow able to reproduce not only the tiniest details of the vehicles, but also every reflection, ultimately producing masterpieces that look more realistic than their photographic references.

Read More »

Things are not as they seem, when it comes to the mind-blowing artworks of London-based sculptor Ron Mueck. Seeing his larger-than-life sculptures of the human body for the first time, you’d be tempted to think you are looking at real-life giants.

Australian-born Ron Mueck is the so of two toy makers, so it’s really not very surprising that he opted for a somewhat similar career, making his very own toys, only on an infinitely more detailed level. He worked as a model-maker and puppeteer on children’s television shows for 15 years, and went on to create special effects makeup for movies like the 1996 fantasy “Labyrinth”, featuring David Bowie. In the 1990s, he started his own company, making models to be photographed for advertisements. Back then, most of his works were only partially completed, as they were meant to be photographed from just one angle, leaving a lot of loose material lurking around the areas captured by the camera lens. Ultimately, he decided photography destroys the physical presence of the original object, so he turned his attention to fine art and sculpture. A wise decision, as his hyper-realistic works of art have now won him international acclaim.

Read More »

At just 22 years old, Italian artist Diego Fazo has developed the skill to create photo-realistic drawings using a simple charcoal pencil. His latest creation, pictured below, has drawn hundreds of positive comments on his Deviant Art profile.

Don’t tell me you can tell the image below is a drawing and not a high-definition photograph, because I don’t buy it. In fact people were so skeptical this incredible piece of art was drawn by hand that young Diego Fazo had to put up some photos of the work in progress just to lay doubts to rest. And looking at his-mind-blowing masterpiece, can you really blame people for  questioning it’s hand-drawn?

Like other talented artists who started their careers on Deviant Art, Diego is a self-taught pencil master whose technique matured with the passing of the years. He started out as a tattoo artist, and developed a passion for creating photo-realistic drawings. Inspired by the works of Japanese artists from the Edo period, like Katsushika Hokusai, he managed to capture people’s imaginations with his precise lines and oriental drawing techniques.

Read More »

There’s no way to tell, but you’re actually not looking at a photograph, but a hyper-realistic painting by London-born artist Robin Eley. Armed with a simple paintbrush he’s able to create photo-quality works of art that draw attention instantly.

Born in London, raised in Australia and educated in the United States, Robin Eley is a man of three continents. But more impressive than his life’s story and journey are his amazing hyper-realistic works. Most of the subjects depicted in his large-scale oil paintings are naked and wrapped in plastic foil, with each tiny detail of their bodies and countless reflection of their translucent covers expertly depicted by the artist. “Inspired by history, I extract from the present. Artifacts and textures that reflect the beauty and nobility of decline and question the modern obsession with perfection. While my subjects and technique are intentionally very real, the context in which they are painted is less defined, Eley says about his art.

Read More »

It takes a great artist to show the true power of a pencil, and Newfoundland-based Randy Hann is one such artist. His breathtaking attention to detail translates into drawings that look more like shot with a professional camera than with a simple pencil.Randy Hann is definitely one of the most talented Canadian artists of our time.

The Newfoundland native takes inspiration from the people, wildlife and scenery that surrounds him every day to create spectacular works of art. Born in 1961, Randy says he can always remember being able to draw, even as a young child, but it wasn’t until years later that he started taking his innate abilities seriously. He didn’t attend an art school, but dedicated years to developing and refining his drawing technique. Today, the self-taught artist is internationally-known for his mind-blowing hyperrealistic works. His masterpieces have been exhibited in various art galleries, and many are found in private collections around Canada and throughout the world.

Read More »