Black and White Makeup Transforms Human Faces Into Strangely Familiar Objects

If these guys from the classic Star Trek Episode Let This Be Your LastBattlefield had learned something from their encounter with Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Uhuru and company, and gone back to their cultures, their grandchildren might have made are like this skin painting art from wife and husband duo Alexander Khokhlov and Veronika Ershova.

Here’s more info from My Modern Met:

As technology advances, many artists are using digital tools to create mind-bending optical illusion art. However, other creative minds prefer to take a more hands-on approach, reaching for their pencils and paintbrushes to create eye-catching trompe-l’œil techniques. Taking surreal art a step further, Moscow-based husband and wife duo Alexander Khokhlov and Veronika Ershova use the human face as their canvas in their most recent body art series, Humiforms.

Created using graphic, black and white makeup, each trick-of-the-eye portrait transforms the model into a familiar object or symbol. From an exclamation point to a dandelion, the series explores human emotion and individualism. Khokhlov and Ershova explain in their artist statement: “Internal contradictions and harmony, a passion for excitement and excessive conservatism, a thirst for freedom and selective attention—these are some of the themes that emerge in the Humiforms series.”

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