You’ve probably heard all about the art of drinking coffee, but Karen Eland took that to a higher level and made an art of painting with coffee. Have a look at some of the world’s greatest masterpieces, such as Mona Lisa, or the scene from the Sistine Chapel expressed in espresso! Eland also talks about her technique and how it came about.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sanela.

A few people were lucky enough to be pan pals of a sort with Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh often added sketches or paintings to his letters, to illustrate what he wrote about. BibliOdyssey has a collection of these letter sketches, along with the letters that accompanied them. Link

If you look at his paintings, Bill Guffey may seem like the well-traveled artist. There are paintings of the landscape of Saint Martin la Plaine in France, houses in Anchorage, Alaska, and other far away places – but Bill have never set foot in any of them. Instead, he simply fired up his trusty Google Street View to find vistas to paint!

Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News Technology & Science has the story of how Google offered views of the world to a Kentucky artist:

To reach the closest Wal-Mart, Guffey said he needs at least 30 minutes in the car. But with 30 seconds on his computer, he can fly around the world with Google Street View and paint any place his cursor lands.

Not only does the mapping tool give Guffey and other users a street-level window to many places in the world, it lets them navigate 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical unbroken panoramas.

"I live in a very rural area," the 45-year-old said of the Burkesville, Ky. home he shares with his wife and two daughters. "Here, I can go out and I can paint cows all day, barns all day … With Street View, I can find things I normally wouldn’t see here."

Link to ABC News article | Bill’s Gallery of Google Street View Paintings | Bill’s Blog

These incredibly lifelike paintings were created by John Pugh who calls his artwork “trick of the eye.”

The Californian-born artist said: ‘It seems almost universal that people take delight in being visually tricked.’

Link

Link via Nerd Approved

Link via eOnline

Artist Brian Despain is a fantastic painter with a unique subject – robots. In this video, Roq La Rue Gallery’s Kristen Anderson and Kenny Montana interview Despain about his art, his inspiration and why he’s so passionate about robots.

– via boingboing

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Artist Liz McGrath is selling personalized painted butcher knives just in time for Valentine’s Day. There are two designs, the one shown and one with a cute little mouse on the blade. Each cleaver comes with its own box. They’re only $25 and the perfect way to tell that special someone “till death do us part.”

Link Via BoingBoing

Google just launched a Google Earth feature that lets you view select paintings from The Prado Museum in astonishing details:

The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth. Using Google Earth, art historians, students and tourists everywhere can zoom in on and explore the finer details of the artist’s brushwork that can be easily missed at first glance.

The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)

Link (with a pretty nifty embedded YouTube clip for those of us who don’t have Google Earth installed) – via The Lede Blog

Jonathan Janson paints today’s interwebby people  in a 17th c. Dutch sort of way.  Among his works are Girl in a Red Cap, Young Man with a Cell Phone, and my favorite, Young Girl Writing an Email.

Janson’s paintings have the luminous quality that made Vermeer famous, and his website, Essential Vermeer, indicates he’s spent a lot of time studying the master. He’s learned some good lessons.

Link – via miamakila

Chinese artist Ju Duoqi, 35, specializes in a unique art medium: vegetables! (well, technically digital veggies – but who cares?). Behold her masterpiece above, the veggie Mona Lisa ("Mona Tofu") made out of rice, sea kelp, and tofu.

In The Vegetable Museum series, she revisits in a stunning way some masterpieces of the western painting. Making use of vegetables and food of China’s everyday life – tofu, cabbage, ginger, lotus roots, coriander, sweet potato… – and through digital manipulation, she presents a puzzling series of vegetable compositions representing world famous paintings like Mona Lisa, The Cene by Leonard Da Vinci, The Dream by Pablo Picasso or Marilyn Monroe by Warhol.

Here are a few more:

Napoleon on Potatoes by Ju Duoqi

Van Gogh made of Leek by Ju Duoqi

See many more at Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery: Link – via Compass WebWorks

Previously on Neatorama:

• Album Covers Made of Food
• Carl Warner’s Foodscapes

Kirk Demarais from Arkansas has created a series of lovely paintings of notable movie families as his contribution to this year’s Crazy 4 Cult art show.

Link – via kottke

Julian Beever, the chalk artist who draws 3-D illusions in city streets (previously covered at Neatorama), has been busy making some new amazing paintings.

Link – via ebr303