Brian Lai’s Mind-Boggling Color Inverted Drawings

Brian Lai, a brilliant Malaysian artist, has invented his own technique of drawing called ‘Invert Art’. Using the technique, he is able to make rough sketches materialize into full-fledged realistic drawings, when the colors are inverted using a Photoshop filter.

Lai has created a time-lapse video to demonstrate exactly how he creates these drawings. He first sketches and shades ‘normally’. Then, he completes the drawing by shading it inversely. After this, he takes a photograph of the drawing (he’s in some of the pictures too), and inverts the colors in Photoshop. The details appear, almost magically.

Some of the pictures on the internet of Lai’s work show how he’s successfully used his technique to make a drawing of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. At first, I thought he was holding up a real poster of the movie. Only when I read about his technique, did I realize it was a drawing.

Lai is talented; he has a keen eye that allows him to translate normal images into inverted ones. He does need some time though, to adjust the tone and shading details of his work. For complex images like the Wolverine one, he had an inverted image of a photograph for reference.