You can always count on Asians to take an already-okay concept and take it to the next level. Japanese art student Cho “Chooo-San” Hikaru decided body paint looked to fake and turned it into photorealistic bodypaint. It’s essentially the real life equivalent of that CGI paste they put on Jeff Bridges’ face in the Tron sequel (which was supposed to get another sequel but Disney managed to say nothing about in like 6 years, but I digress).
It’s hard to deny these are incredibly impressive, ranging from “this looks cool” to “now I won’t sleep for ten days”. I think probably the most impressive and at the same time most haunting ones are when she paints extra body parts on faces. That’s some disturbing stuff.
She’s also a huge fan of painting people in a way that makes it look as if they’ve got a zipper or buttons that can be used to, well, open them up. Thankfully not in a “Japanese horror meets Slasher film from the 80s” way.
If you want to get your sci-fi on, she’s also very capable of painting technological parts into people, making them look like cyborgs and/or very lifelike lamps and iPods. Whichever scares you most.
Apparently Chooo-san draws all her images by using nothing but acrylic paint. No Photoshop or technology whatsoever is used to alter the images afterwards. And I can’t even draw a proper sun in actual paint without making it look like a yellow croissant.
Thankfully for us, Cho is a lot more talented than I am. Be sure to take a look at her official webpage, there’s so much more awesome stuff on there that I sadly can’t put here. She’s worth it.
