Alex Queral is a Philadelphian sculptor best known for using old phone books to carve their pages into celebrities faces.

Some of the celebrities he’s made sculptures of include Barack Obama, Jack Nicholson, Frida Kahlo and John Goodman.

The process takes at least a couple of weeks to complete.

He begins by sketching the famous person’s face on a piece of paper and laying it over the phone book, after that he uses a razor blade, patiently carving away at the thousands of pages that lie within phone book to create the 3D portrait.

He then paints each face with a monochromatic wash to distinguish the portraits from the pages.

Queral says that creating these portraits is a very tense process because it takes so long to do, and if you “cut something away you can’t get it back again.” Below you can check out 21 unbelievable examples of his carvings…

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