Photorealistic Portraits By Irakli Nadar

To be fair, the Tbilisi-based artist admits that some aspects of his technique are generally frowned upon in the digital art world. For example, he bases many of his artworks on reference photos he finds online, and sometimes does manipulate them in image editors like Adobe Photoshop, “to get a better idea for the composition” and see what his digital painting will look like. Once he’s happy with the result, he starts working on a blank canvas, replicating the composition from scratch.
Despite his popularity, or, maybe because of it, Irakli Nadar is often accused of “photobashing”, a process where filters are applied to a digital photograph to make it look like it has been painted. Looking at the incredibly detailed artworks he is able to create, it’s not hard to understand why some people don’t believe they were made from scratch. That’s why Irakli often posts beginning-to-end videos of his painting process and sometimes even livestreams painting sessions.
He says, “Yes that’s right, there was a lot of speculations around my art and there still is. At first I got very angry and sad, because I knew true process behind my art. Though haters gave me more motivation to work harder and to achieve my goals. Then I did start to record process videos, I even live-streamed my painting process and it helped a lot, but hate is still there. As I said some people are born to jump on the hate train. It was not strange for me that people misunderstood my art as photo-bash or paint-over, the strange part was people hating without reason or silly reasons like why I use only one layer to paint or why are my layers empty all the time, why I have a reference beside my painting and why I even use photo reference at all, etc,”