The Japanese Artist Painting Pictures So Realistic They Look Like Photographs

A Japanese artist has been earning plaudits and wowing people around the world for his paintings that look like photographs.

Kei Mieno's paintings are so detailed and realistic that they genuinely look too complex to have been painted by someone. They tend to feature women (but also sometimes feature potatoes) and are detailed down to every individual hair on their heads (not the potatoes).

Mieno is 33 years old and has been painting professionally for about 10 years, sharing his hyper realistic paintings on Twitter with his 45.1k followers.

His latest picture, showing a girl lying in a river, has been liked more than 131,000 times and retweeted 48,000 times. Those are some pretty impressive numbers.

Now, my Japanese isn't that good, but looking at a few of the hashtags that he uses it would seem as if his main medium is oil painting. He also uses watercolours, but it's pretty difficult to achieve the photo realistic effect using just that.

Even if the paintings were photographs you would have to imagine that he'd used a pretty good camera. It must take incredible patience to sit there with a tiny brush and your oil paints outlining and planning exactly where every single strand of hair has to go to achieve the perfect effect of a woman's ponytail.

He's also pretty much mastered the art of shadowing, managing to capture how light reflects and changes across someone's face. It really is remarkable.

Mieno has recently been featured in a gallery in his native Japan - his works were exhibited between 18 April and 6 May in the Gallery Suchi Small Collection at the Hoki Museum, in Chiba.

In his spare time - or at least, when he isn't painting - he teaches others his techniques in watercolour and oil painting.

He also enjoys photography, which might not come as too much of a surprise looking at what he can do with a set of oil paints. He's obviously got an eye for a picture, and the patience to sit there and bring it to life without using a camera.

On his official website, he says: "After graduating from Hiroshima City University College of Art, I've been living as a painter.

"I do realism."

You do realism? That's somewhat of an understatement. If he came and drew a conservatory door onto the wall in your house, you'd walk straight into it. No doubt.

Whether you're a wine-quaffing, beret-wearing art lover, or you don't know much about art but you know what you like, you'd have to admit these are some seriously impressive skills.

What a LAD.