Faux Oil Painting/Hyper Realistic Acrylic Body Painting

Are you wondering what it is?  Well, here it is:

Credit to Peter Kun Frary



Credit to Alexa Meade



Credit to Alexa Meade


They all look like legitimate paintings, yes?


Well, they are...


Except not.





These are all real people who have been painted with acrylic body paint and have been incorporated with their backgrounds.  The irony in all this is that painters of centuries past have created paintings in order to make their piece of art as realistic as possible.  Now Alexa Meade, one of these artists, have taken real people and made them as unrealistic looking (painting-esque) as possible.


I find these to be truly amazing pieces of art, but how does design come into play?  Although I'm not a specialist quite yet, I know that there is a lot of design involved in how the background is set up, precisely how the people are painted, and where exactly they're placed in their specific background.
The first picture, by Frary, is actually all make up and was shot outside a MAC cosmetics store in Hawaii.  She was wearing very little clothing (a bikini) and managed to look like she was wearing a long sleeved shirt.  Impressive... but also most likely incredibly expensive to pull off (the fact that it's MAC cosmetics doesn't really help with the pricing).
The next 2 were done and photographed by Alexa Meade.  She has an entire gallery of people she had painted with acrylic body paint.  What is so amazing is not only the skill involved in making these people look like paintings even though they're three-dimensional; what is amazing is having them put all the pieces of this artistic puzzle together to create a piece of art out of reality that doesn't look like reality.  
As a bunch of jumbled nonsense as that sounds, it truly is something that we've never seen before and something I'd like to see more of in the future.  With artistic talent and an eye for the arts, the design involved is definitely important in giving the pieces their final structure and their final look.  I really hope we see more of this in the future and I really hope more people see it and appreciate it as the art it truly is.