Samia Al Homsi Dagher, a software engineer and illustrator from Lebanon, has made a name for herself by creating stunningly realistic ballpoint pen portraits. From celebrities to commission portraits of everyday people, this talented artist’s artworks are sometimes hard to tell apart from photographs.

Born in 1987, the Tripoli-based artist started drawing when she was only five years old, and as you can see from the images below, she has gotten a lot better since. She is now considered one of the world’s best ballpoint pen illustrators, and it’s not hard to see why. The attention to detail, the precision of every stroke and dot, the perfect proportions of various facial features, all come together to form drawings that are sometimes indistinguishable from photographs.

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Spilling coffee is never fun, but for German designer Stefan Kuhnigk it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He turned that first coffee stain into a small monster and has been creating Coffee Monsters ever since.

Stefan recalls looking at the stain his cup of dark espresso left on a piece of paper and it looking back at him as if saying “Draw me, draw me, draw meeee!”. So he did just that, and create his very first Coffee Monster. The next day, he thought back on this little accident that had challenged him to get creative, and decided he could replicate the coffee spill every day as an exercise in creativity.

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In the mid 90s, when Microsoft Windows 95 was launched, MS Paint was one of the operating system’s most fascinating tools. But creating truly impressive artworks with it required a lot of time and mountains of patience, so it came as no surprise that digital artists migrated to more advanced software like Adobe Photoshop as soon as they came out. Not all of them, though. Take amateur illustrator Pat Hines, who has been using MS Paint for over a decade, because he just couldn’t get the hang of modern editing software.

34-year-old Pat Hines discovered Microsoft Paint about 12 years ago, while working long overnights at a hospital reception desk, as a security guard. He didn’t really like Windows games like Solitaire or Free Cell, so he would kill time by practicing his artistic talents in the rudimentary digital editor. His early works weren’t more than simple doodles, but as time passed and he learned the ins and outs of the software, his illustrations got better, and he developed his own style. Hines claims that one of the most important things he learned while honing his MS Paint skills in his off time on the job was that a single pixel can make a notable difference in his artwork.

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If you look carefully at Armenian artist Davit Yukhanyan’s meticulously intricate illustrations, you’ll realize that they actually consist of hundreds of smaller illustrations that make up the form, background and shading of the main drawing.

The incredibly talented 26-year-old has been drawing and creating for as long as he can remember. Although he works as an architect now, he tries to draw whenever he finds the time. “Drawing is my passion and music is my inspiration,” he said.

For his ‘drawings within a drawing’, he uses a technical pen and paper, and makes them entirely by hand with no digital manipulation. “Just as everything in our world consists of different pieces, my drawing also consists of different pieces in the form of small illustrations that come together into one overall creation,” he said. “I draw the artwork with this concept in mind.”

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For the average illustrator, scribbling isn’t the best way to create realistic-looking portraits. But then again, Vince Low isn’t your average illustrator. The Malaysian artist somehow manages to produce impeccable portraits of some of Hollywood’s greatest actors using only childish scribbles.

The lead illustrator of Malaysian advertising agency, Grey, Vince Low has an impressive portfolio of stunning artworks, but his latest portrait series, called Faces, is particularly eye-catching. That’s because the stunning depictions of stars like Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith or Leonardo Di Caprio were all done exclusively with scribbles on blank white canvases. Most people would have a hard time capturing their unique features using classic drawing techniques, but he creates highly accurate facial representation just by overlapping thousands of swirling lines. Amazing or what?

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If you like unique art mediums, you’re going to love Corey Corcoran’s work. The Boston-based artist uses mushrooms as canvases for his original illustrations.

Creating really good illustrations is hard enough on paper, but on the surface of Ganoderma applanatum (also known as Artist Conk mushroom) is even harder. You can erase a mistake on a piece of paper, but once something is etched into the skin of the mushroom, it can’t be undone. But that doesn’t seem to bother Corey Corcoran, on the contrary, it’s probably one of the things that attracted him to this weird choice for a canvas. He has to be very precise when engraving the fruits of his imagination into the mushroom, using the changing shades of brown to create truly unique works of natural art. The size of his works ranges from six inches to two feet, depending on the mushroom canvas, and the theme mostly revolves around plant life, insects, and people.

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Moscow-based graphic designer Andrew Gorkovenko has recently created a series of awe-inspiring dry tea illustration, as part of a series of packaging designs for Triptea. I’d definitely buy some, if only for the box artworks.

Talk about an unusual and refreshing art medium. There are a few thing I imagined could be done with dry tea, but drawing definitely wasn’t one of them. Obviously, Russian graphic designer Andrew Gorkovenko has a richer imagination, since he came up with the idea of using the nicely-scented dried and ground tea leaves to create these amazing concept illustrations for Triptea ‘s packaging. Using only basic tools to manipulate the dry tea on white paper canvases, Gorkovenko created a series of intricate designs which illustrate the origin of the different tea varieties – the Great Wall of China and a detailed pagoda for green tea, a picturesque Ceylon landscape for black tea, etc. As Christopher from Colossal notes, Andrew really went above and beyond for this campaign. Triptea must be pleased.

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They might look like sloppy prints or stenciled graffiti, but in fact you’re looking at unique works of art made with thousands of poppy seeds. Unbelievable, I know.

These incredible illustrations are the work of British artist Rebecca Foster, renowned for her talent of turning food and spices into regular art mediums. She is regularly commissioned by famous brands in the food industry to create works of art using their products. Apart from this mind-blowing series of poppy seed illustrations, she has used other unusual ingredients, like steak and ketchup, or foods from a traditional Sunday dinner, to make her original works. You can check them out on Rebecca’s official site.

The poppy seed artworks below were created back in 2009 for a Hovis advertising campaign, and each illustration took around five hours to complete.

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English graphic designer, David Meldrum, also known as The Food Illustrator, has kept a record of everything he has eaten and drunk for an entire year, by creating 365 illustrations.

Wanting to create a historical record not only of what he ate, but of today’s food related trends, packaging, design and typography, David Meldrum began his Food Illustrator project on June 15, 2010, and kept track of every little thing he consumed by drawing his every meal in a sketchbook he kept on him at all times. It was a pretty tough challenge, but he never missed a day, as that would have meant cheating himself and his work. David used acrylic, collage, watercolour, pen and ink to create his illustrations.

The Food Illustrator ended on June 14, 2011 and the result was a shockingly realistic food diary of an average person’s diet, with 1,360 consumed cups of coffee, 305 pints of Peroni lager, 122 Freddo chocolate bars, spaghetti, salads and McDonald’s fast food. All of his 365 colorful illustrations were on display through June 26, at the Arch 402 Gallery, in London, and art lovers could buy them.

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