Art has always been a huge part of Israeli-based makeup artist Tal Peleg’s life. “As a child I was always painting and creating stuff, and used my young sister as a model for all kind of photoshoots and weird makeup experiments,” Peleg says. Her first real “gigs” were in high school while doing stage makeup for the theater and acting classes. “After high school and two years of military service, I went to makeup school, and after that, four nerve-wracking years of visual communication studies,” Peleg says. “After I finished my studies I had a really hard time choosing my professional path. I had so many passions in life—painting and illustration, makeup, photography.”

It wasn’t long before Peleg started creating eye art—elaborate woks of makeup art that uses her eye as the canvas. “Makeup is an amazing form of art and I've tried to push the limits and challenge myself to be able to make my eye tell a story,” she says. “I don't just paint on the eye, but try to use the shape of the eye and its natural curves as part of the illustration in a creative way.”

And Peleg finds her inspiration everywhere. “I look for the things that I find interesting in the world, and give it my own unique artistic interpretation using makeup,” she says. “It can be emotions, fairytales, movies, animals—cat obsession alert!—favorite food or even things I find interesting and challenging to turn into makeup, like my grandmother's dementia, manic-depression, Anne Frank, or to use my art and exposure to raise awareness to important matters like anti-bullying or adopting pets from shelters.”

Peleg creates all of her eye-art on her own eye, and uses mostly eyeshadows and liners as her medium. “What I do for a living is very versatile and it keeps my life interesting so I like it that way,” she says. See more of Peleg’s eye-art on Instagram at @tal_peleg.