When people ask Japanese artist Maruraba_2 (his Twitter handle) what drawing and design software he recommends, his answer is always ‘Excel’. Many take it as a joke, but only because they have no idea that his incredibly detailed anime art is created exclusively with the spreadsheet program.

To those of us who don’t work in accounting or simply hate crunching numbers, Microsoft Excel is extremely boring, but only because we haven’t discovered its true potential. To Twitter user @Maruraba_2, on the other hand, the spreadsheet software is an extremely valuable artistic tool that allows him to create amazing anime-inspired artworks. I have no idea how he does it, but all the digital drawings he posts on Twitter are done exclusively with Microsoft Excel.

Photo: Maruraba_2/Twitter

Maruraba_2 seems to have a passion for drawing popular anime heroines, and so far, his portfolio includes portraits of Miho Nishino of Girls und Panzer, Eromanga Sensei’s Sagiri, Tsuchinoko from Kemono Friends, just to name a few. He sometimes posts printscreens of his art as works in progress, and the process he uses seems awfully complex and time-consuming, which only makes me appreciate the end results even more.

If you’re well-versed in digital art, Maruraba_2 might seem a bit too angular, but to a complete noob like me they look absolutely perfect.

Interestingly, Maruraba_2 is not the only one able to use Microsoft Excel as an art tool. Back in 2013, we featured the work of Tatsuo Horiuchi, who used it to create detailed traditional Japanese drawings.