Nuria Salcedo is a self-taught artist who uses coffee to paint incredibly detailed illustrations and portraits of celebrities. While she also uses brown pencils for the most intricate parts of her artworks, her characters are always painted with various tones of coffee.

A trained architect, Nuria Salcedo never took art classes. She always liked drawing, but her skills are only the result of many hours of practice, her studying Architecture in school, and whatever tips she picked off online. the young Spanish artist was inspired to use coffee as a medium for her art after coming across the works of Maria A. Aristidou, another artist famous for her beautiful coffee paintings. She had been experimenting with many styles and mediums until then, but somehow coffee just seem to suit her best and she’s been painting with it ever since.

Photo: Nuria Salcedo/Instagram

“At that point, I needed something that made me stand out from the rest of artists because I was not good enough with colored pencils or with other traditional techniques so I decided to give coffee a try,” Nuria told Sprudge Magazine. “I have always liked being creative and coffee gave me a lot of new possibilities. I fell in love with it after finishing my first piece and I have not stopped using coffee since then. I guess it is going to take me longer to become a great artist without that background but with faith and passion—and coffee—I hope to achieve a great level one day.”

You may be wondering how the self-taught artist manage to achieve this level of detail in her works, and the truth is she has a secret weapon. Apart from several cups of gradually diluted coffee, she also uses brown pencil to sketch out her artworks beforehand, but also to add the final details. Her artworks are always painted with several layers of coffee, though.

Nuria Salcedo started taking coffee painting seriously about four years ago, and while she has yet to reach the limits of her artistic talent, she admits that her art has come a long way over the years. In the beginning it was all about copying a picture, but today she is more interested in the creative process behind every artwork, merging different ideas and even creating original works.

Some of Nuria Salcedo’s most impressive works include portraits of Hollywood celebrities like Eddie Redmayne or Jared Leto, but also insanely detailed depictions of K-Pop stars, which she seems to have taken a special interest as of late.