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.

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28-year-old Irakli Nadar is considered one of the most talented digital artists of our time. Using only digital painting tools, he is able to create photo-like portraits from scratch. His works are so good that many in the digital art world accuse him of simply applying various filters to digital photographs and passing them off as paintings.

You could say that Irakli Nadar’s amazing skill is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, his breathtaking artworks have brought him worldwide fame and legions of adoring fans on various social networks, but his success and enviable skill have also made him the target of criticism from both rival artists and the average internet trolls. Luckily, he has learned to live with both, and says that tough as it sometimes is, he just ignores the haters and focuses on the positive.

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Last year, a couple of Japanese digital artists shocked the world when they revealed that their daughter Saya, a young beautiful Japanese schoolgirl, wasn’t actually a real person, but an ultra-realistic computer generated model. The two have been working on making Saya look even more life-like ever since, and a recently revealed photo of their “daughter” has once again blown people’ minds.

Saya 2016 takes computer-generated realism to new heights. Everything about her, from the strands of her dark hair and the reflection in her eyes, to the life-like look of her skin is almost perfect, and I find it difficult to believe that most people could tell that she wasn’t a real person if they didn’t know her story beforehand.

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When it comes to painting, or even digital art, Microsoft Excel isn’t usually the first thing that pops into your head. Yet 73-year-old artist, Tatsuo Horiuchi, has been using it to create stunningly beautiful traditional Japanese artworks.

If you’re going to use software for artistic purposes, why not use something like the powerful and popular Adobe Photoshop, right? Well, Tatsuo Horiuchi’s explanation sort of makes sense – he says graphics software is too expensive, while Microsoft Excel came pre-installed on his computer. Plus, although he had never used it himself, before he retired from his job he often saw his colleagues using it to create graphs, so he thought the program could be used to draw art as well. In his early pension years, Horiuchi decided he wanted to try something new, so he bought a computer and began experimenting with digital painting. At first, he tried Microsoft Word, but he experienced problems with determining the canvas size to fit the printing paper, so he ultimately turned to Excel, which had a neat feature that automatically reduced the worksheet size to fit his A4 printing paper. Painting in a spreadsheet application was hard at first, but the ambitious Tatsuo managed to hone is skills, and during the last 10 years he has established himself as an original artist, with exhibitions all over Japan.

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Ever wondered what the sky must have looked like when Vincent Van Gogh painted his famous Starry Night? Well, Alex Cruz has and he even created his own realistic-looking version of the post-impressionist’s masterpiece, using Photoshop.

“I’ve often wondered about how the night ski looked to Van Gogh when he painted Starry Night,” Ruiz said. “I wanted this piece to be somewhat magical and fantastic, not just a normal night painting. Hence the large moon, large stars, transparent clouds, etc., yet keeping a mostly realistic feel to it.” I don’t know how long it took the Dutch artist to finish his famous artwork, but Ruiz did his in just 7 hours, using matte painting techniques in Photoshop. Art sure has come a long way since the 1800s.

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Ralph Ueltzhoefer probably took the saying “a picture is worth a thousands words” because he actually builds detailed images from thousands of written words.

The Mannheim-based German artist takes photos of celebrities from the Internet and recreates their portraits with words randomly-selected from Internet biographies, fragments of words and phrases, and Wikipedia articles that have come to define these famous people. Ueltzhoefer sets the white text line by line on the dark background, thus making a statement about how media defines our every day lives in a Web-centered world. His Textportraits are a symbiosis between text and photo, biography and portrait, a readable version of two different components.

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