Unbelievable Hand Paintings That Might Fool Your Brain

Anyone can mess around with body painting, but there is a big difference between a painting on a finger or hand and these hand paintings. These are almost like optical illusions, and you’ll forget you are looking at hands when you see them. What’s even more interesting to learn is that these hand paintings are part of an advertising campaign for an insurance company whose byline is “You’re in good hands.”

To get results as incredible as this, it takes both a very talented photographer and an extremely skilled body painter to pull it off. For this project, photographer Ray Massey and body painter Annie Ralli worked together to turn these hands into beautiful works of art.

I’m sure positioning the hands to be in just the right place was very important component of this since as you see, the hands themselves are twisted and turned to transform this art into creative scenes. I wonder if they have to practice this a few times before they get it right. I read that when artists paint on skin, they have to be a bit quick about it because painting on a living, moving canvas is not stable.

I’ve written about body painting many times before, but I like finger and hand painting much better. It’s smaller, more detailed and a lot more impressive to me. It truly is a very special niche of art. Everything about this process was done well from the painting, the photography, the retouching, the backgrounds, the colors…Love it! If you’d like to see another type of hand art (they’re not really hand paintings, but more of hand drawings), check out Playboy’s Ads About Wanking. It’s another really creative use of hands (and I don’t mean the wanking part).