Photorealistic Portraits By Irakli Nadar

Irakli Nadar (b. 1989) is a digital artist from Tbilisi, Georgia, and is considered one of the most talented digital artists of our time. Using only digital painting tools, he is able to create photo-like portraits from scratch. His works are so good that many in the digital art world accuse him of simply applying various filters to digital photographs and passing them off as paintings.
You could say that Irakli Nadar’s amazing skill is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, his breathtaking artworks have brought him worldwide fame and legions of adoring fans on various social networks, but his success and enviable skill have also made him the target of criticism from both rival artists and the average internet trolls. Luckily, he has learned to live with both, and says that tough as it sometimes is, he just ignores the haters and focuses on the positive.
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.