Scale models of cars are nothing new. Go to the toy section of a department store and you will see a sea of different brands, sizes and colors. But in the end, these all look exactly like artificial, mass-assembled toys.

Meet Eddie Putera, a Malaysian photographer and visual artist who specializes in automotive dioramas. He has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram because of his incredible creations. So incredible, in fact, you’d suspect they had been digitally edited.

His workplace is a scale-modeler’s wet dream. You could say he lives in his own motoring fantasy world. A world any petrolhead would want to get lost in.

He starts with clean, basic die-cast toy cars. Consider them canvases that he turns into masterpieces.

How human hands are able to do what he does is almost inconceivable. He is particularly adept at producing ‘rust’. His metal corrosion looks more realistic than the flaking you noticed on your car’s right fender the other day.

But more than the fake rust, it’s his microscopic attention to detail that gets people staring at his photographs.

If you think this level of scale-modeling obsession is just a waste of time, you have to know that there’s serious money to be made from this craft. Putera actually has a website that sells his miniature creations.

Still think all of this is mere juvenile stuff? It’s never too late to pick up the hobby, you know. You might turn out to be very good at this.