If you’ve ever used a pencil, you know how brittle and delicate the pencil lead is. Somehow, Japanese artist Shiroi is able to carve that fragile material into stunningly detailed micro-artworks.

Mr. Shiroi (@shir0003) took up pencil lead carving seven years ago, after watching a segment on renowned Japanese pencil carver Toshiyuki Yamazaki on TV. He was blown away by the level of detail the master lead carver could achieve, and decided to give it a try for himself. As you can imagine, simply keeping his hand steady enough to keep from breaking the fragile lead was a huge challenge in the beginning, but he kept at it. Today, Shiroi is a pencil lead carving master in his own right.

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Shaun Mckenzie, who goes by the name of NeeYellow on social media, is an insanely-talented artist who specializes in hyper-realistic color pencil drawings that look like photographs.

The young Australian artist spends anywhere from 60 to 80 hours creating his photorealistic masterpieces, and looking at the degree of detail in some of his works it’s easy to see why he spends so much time on them. To be fair, that is just the average time required to complete a drawing; he has finished some in as “few” as 15 hours, but he has also spent over 280 hours on one of his drawings. It’s painstaking, laborious process that requires mountains of patience is what I’m trying to say.

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Emanuele Dascanio is a super-talented artist whose graphite and charcoal pencil drawings look like high-resolution black-and-white photographs.

Looking at some of 37-year-old Emanuele Dascanio’s masterpieces, it’s easy to see why he sometimes takes hundreds of hours to complete a single piece. He often works 12 to 14 hours a day, often sacrificing his private life for art, but he sees it as an investment, if he sows a lot today, he’ll have more results to harvest in the future. The level of detail he is able to achieve using simple pencils is mind-blowing, making it easy to understand why is considered one of the most gifted hyperrealists of this generation.

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Brazilian artist Sheila R. Giovanni specializes in incredibly detailed, hand-drawn portraits of celebrities, some of which cannot be told apart from high-resolution photographs.

Over the last twelve years, we’ve featured some talented portrait artists on Oddity Central, but Sheila R. Giovanni is definitely one of the best. Using only colored pencils, she is able to create photo-quality masterpieces perfect to the tiniest of details. Looking at some her best works, it’s no surprise that Sheila can spend up to 100 hours on a single project, as her attention to detail is pretty obvious. From expertly-placed shading and glows, to strands of hair and even the reflections in her subjects’ eyes, Giovanni’s artworks really are almost as life-like as photographs.

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Jono Dry is only 28-years-old and has never taken art classes, but his incredible talent allows him to create these photographic quality drawings using only graphite pencils. The young South African artist is considered one of the few people in the world able to take drawing pat the limits of what is considered achievable with simple graphite pencils.

Jono spends most of his time working on his large-scale drawings, and usually takes about 2-3 months to complete a piece, but he once spent a whopping 5 months painstakingly drawing one of his most complicated artworks. Considering how incredible the result of his labor ends up looking and the fact that he only produces between 4 and 8 large-scale drawings per year, Jono Dry’s hand-drawn masterpieces are considered very exclusive among collectors.

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Take a look at the photo below. Can you believe this is not a photograph, but an (almost) pixel-perfect pencil rendition of a stock photo? Neither could eye (pun intended), but it’s true. This is the kind of work Italian artist Flavio Apel is capable of.

Apel says his passion for drawing started out as a simple hobby, which makes his amazing artworks that much more impressive. He definitely became quite serious about drawing at some point in his life, because he is currently able to draw human eyes and skin to perfection. From the tiniest of wrinkles to the slim veins in the eyeball, Flavio’s works seem flawless black-and-white photographs and you probably need an expert to tell them apart.

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Teacher and part time artist Meghan Maconochie uses colored pencils to create art, but not in the conventional sense. Instead of coloring with the pencils, she sharpens them and layers the shavings to on a white background to create all kinds of cool things, ranging from animals, to food and portraits of pop icons.

Meghan’s love affair with pencil shavings began when she participated in a color competition called ‘Nifty250’ last year. “I was sharpening a pencil when I decided to create the Nifty250 logo using the shavings from the pencil,” she said. She did just that, and her work was declared the winner. Soon, she began making more and more pieces using pencil shavings.

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Although he started drawing with pencils after the age of 40, Adolfo Fernandez Rodriguez – a Madrid based artist, quickly mastered this technique. Using only colored pencils, he now draws life-like characters, bubbles, reflections and ripples of water that often get confused with hyper-realistic oil paintings and even photographs.

His mind-blowing creations include incredibly realistic waves and drops of water, distorted reflections as well as some very accurate depictions of statues and extremely detailed complex pieces such as two hands on a pile of hay with every straw carefully contoured, or the pages of a book where the artist really took the time to fill the pages with words and drawings. “I only recently discovered this Spanish artist and, really, what else is there to say about his work except – ‘WOW!’ Done in a very realistic style, all of his drawings look like paintings and many of them are almost impossible to tell apart from a photograph. I find not only his work, but also his interpretations and expressions of the love he feels for his many subjects, to be incredibly inspiring,” fellow pencil artist Lissa Rachelle Robillard wrote about Rodriguez’s work.

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Cerkahegyzo is a Hungarian artist who transforms common pencils into seemingly digitally-altered works of art. In reality, the miniature sculptor uses just a few basic tools and mountains of patience to create these intricate masterpieces.

Believe it or not, Budapest-based artist Cerkahegyzo manages to produce all these unreal artworks out of a single pencil. Some of his works may give the impression that he somehow fuses together the elements of multiple pencils to achieve the desired effect, but it’s only an optical illusion. He uses razor blades and needles to painstakingly carve away at the lead base and wooden casing, as well as sandpaper, files, and polishing stones to shape his intricate designs. Taking inspiration from established miniature sculptors like Dalton Ghetti, Misuta Tasogare and Kato Jado, the Humgarian master creates all sorts of incredible patterns that leave the viewer wondering “how did he do it?”

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Lovely black and white photos, wouldn’t you say? Well, can you believe these were actually done completely by pencil?

Paul Lung, a 38-year-old artist, from Hong Kong, needs only an 0.5 mm technical  graphite pencil and sheets of A2 paper to create some of the most unbelievable works of art. Paul has loved to draw ever since he can remeber, and now he does it for 3-4 hours every day, when he comes home from work. He never uses erasers and spends up to 60 hours working on each of his drawings, but the results are simply breathtaking.

Paul says even his friends don’t believe he actually draws his creations, until they see him at work. That’s understandable, considering it’s practically impossible to tell they’re done by pencil, unless you get close enough.

Photos via BeautifulLife

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