Sometimes fingers, dipped in paint almost by accident, can completely change the course of an artist’s career. This is what happened to Seattle-based artist Iris Scott, who is now famous for her incredible finger-painting art. Iris paints with a pair of surgical gloves on, and her finger moves resembles those of a pianist as she touches multiple points on the canvas at the same time.

When viewed from a distance, a portrait of Chuck Close’s grandmother-in-law looks like a classic black and white photograph. However, when you come closer, you start to notice that the picture is actually made of thousands of fingerprints. “Fanny/Fingerpainting” represents one of the largest and most masterly executions of a technique Chuck Close developed in the mid-l980s. That technique involved the direct application of pigment to a surface with the artist’s fingertips. By adjusting the amount of pigment and the pressure of his finger on the canvas, Close could achieve a wide range of tonal effects.

As strange as it sounds, New York-based artist Judith Braun creates all these wonderful landscapes and abstract patterns using nothing but her fingers dipped in charcoal dust. Braun says that she often uses her both hands simultaneously to the extent of arms’ reach as this allows the inherent symmetry of the body to generate a gestural vocabulary of mark making.