Photo Realistic Artists

Diego Fazio

Artist Diego Fazio (also known online as DiegoKoi) can do some incredible things with a pencil. His hyperrealistic portraits are so lifelike they are often confused with black and white photographs.

Born in 1989 in Lamezia, Italy, this emerging talent is self-taught. He only began drawing in 2007 but has already won numerous awards.

Joongwon Charles Jeong

Joongwon Charles Jeong's paintings are so intricate many people mistake them for photos. He paints with such delicate brush strokes he can detail every pore of his subjects.

The artist, who hails from South Korea and studied Visual Communication Design at the Hongik University of Fine Art & Design in Seoul, also teaches keen young artists some of the tricks of his trade.

Gottfried Helnwein

Gottfried Helnwein is an Austrian-Irish visual artist who has worked as a painter, draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor, and installation and performance artist, using a wide variety of techniques and media.

Helnwein is concerned primarily with psychological and sociological anxiety, historical issues and political topics. As a result of this, his work is often considered provocative and controversial. His paintings walk the line between upsetting and beautiful but are always provocative. While his subject matter isn't for everyone (it usually revolves around violence and children), his skills with a brush are undeniable.

Robin Eley

When you find out that the works of Robin Eley are oil paintings and not photos, you immediately go back to have another look. As hard as it is to paint people in such a realistic manner, Robin also “wraps” his models into plastic, which makes his art all the more impressive.

Eley spends around five weeks on a painting, working around 90 hours a week. He tries to explore the perception of isolation in the modern world, and the plastic wrap in his pictures works as a medium for this, since “it is something you can see through, but not feel through."

Kyle Lambert

This hyperrealistic image was created with an iPad! That's right—it's a finger painting. Artist Kyle Lambert said that it took him a month to create his stunning portrait of actor Morgan Freeman. He used the iPad app Procreate to put together his masterpiece. The British-born artist spent over 200 hours and made over 285,000 brushstrokes, a process that he documented in a transfixing time lapse video.

Dru Blair

She could not look lovelier. However, the above image of a model named Tica is not a photograph, but a painting.

The incredible likeness was created by US-based airbrush artist Dru Blair and took more than 70 hours of painstaking work using ultra-thin lines of paint. He uses mini spray guns to deposit fine lines of paint on a board to produce the lifelike pictures—right down to skin pores.