33-year-old Trina Merry camouflages her models with city landscapes, including the Manhattan Bridge and Empire State Building.
“This is kind of my way of connecting with the city and trying to understand it a little bit better,” she says.
Her art form is the result of a meticulous process that relies on models to hold their pose perfectly still for hours, even with the distraction of passers-by on busy city streets.
"A big misconception that people have is that I'm just a street performer when I make work outside of the studio, and I've had people come up and try to give me money and I always say, no, thank you. This is art, it's free for everybody," she says.
Model, Jessica Mellow is wearing only bikini bottoms and a pair of running shoes.
"It feels great to be painted, it's actually really exciting and you feel the transformation process. The brush itself, it's really soft. It feels more like a massage," she says.
Merry says it takes about six hours to complete a work, which is preserved in photographs before it is quickly washed away. Merry carefully checks weather forecasts to make sure there is no chance of rain.
"There's only one angle and one place where you can take this photograph, and I have to keep running back and checking and making sure that I'm lining up everything," she says.
New York City's relatively liberal laws that allow a woman to stand topless in the middle of a busy street help the process, but police intervention still needs to occasionally be dealt with.
But she says the end result is always worth the trouble.
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