Adding makeup is similar to painting skin. For this project, we asked Sir John, who has worked with Khloé Kardashian, Chrissy Teigen, and Beyoncé, to create a beauty look specifically for Shudu—he focused on a modern, fresh, and bright look in pink tones to pop against her dark skin tone.

“I take Sir John’s sketch and Shudu’s face texture, and I start to paint onto the skin, following the face chart and the makeup,” Wilson describes the process. “It’s on a flat surface, so it looks very strange.”

For the purposes of this beauty shoot, Wilson kept the background minimal—just a simple, bright orange—so he could keep the focus on Shudu’s gorgeous skin and makeup.

“The most difficult aspect in getting Shudu right is often the finer details. Things like the eyes are very, very difficult,” he says. “You don’t realize that so, so much of what makes us look alive is there in the eyes and how they reflect the light. You have to constantly be adapting and changing little things just to make sure that they look real.”

And voilà—a very real-looking image of a very fake person!

Wilson sees CGI modeling as a future avenue for real-life models to book multiple gigs at the same time or to save time and physical work for jobs that pay more.

In Wilson’s version of the future, the new generation of Supermodels could get their whole body scanned, and, after agreeing to appear in an ad or an editorial shoot, an entity could “pose” and “style” her digital form to fit their needs, according to a contract. Wilson believes this even has the potential to extend models’ careers past their heydays.

“The famous quote is, ‘I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day,’” Wilson says.

“What if you didn’t even have to get out of bed at all?”