The Russian duo of make-up artist Valeriya Kutsan and photographer Alexander Khokhlov took to recreating some of the finest and most famous artworks of all times such as, Leonardo da Vinci’s lady with a smile: Mona Lisa, or the bold and beautiful comic styled female character of Roy Lichtenstein.

Instead of using the canvas, Valeriya Kutsan decided to use real human faces to recreate these masterpieces and her use of brilliant colors and bold outlines makes these portraits appear two-dimensional. From facial red dots and canary yellow hair color to newspaper cuttings and oil paints, Valeriya made her dream come true by creating the project in pop-art style.

“Valeriya decided to use different techniques of make-up to create our own posters with model faces so even the Mona Lisa in our project is digitalized and looks modern,” said Khokhlov.

This series of unusually creative images, known as “2D or not 2D,” took hours of make-up on each model and days of post-production work to make them look awesomely realistic and picture perfect.

Khokhlov, 31, gave more insight into the making of this project: “‘First of all we began the shoot inspired by pop-art and Andy Warhol pictures, and after that we found a lot of creative pictures, images, sketches and patterns.”

The whole process can be summarized in three steps for each image: picture choosing, make-up and post-production.

“It was a long process and took about two to four hours for each models’ make-up and up to five days of post-production to make the pictures perfect.”

Check out the amazing portraits and see for yourself how cleverly realistic they are!