You know what Excel is, right?  That wonderful Microsoft product for creating spreadsheets has been around quite awhile.  It’s quite useful for calculating totals and making graphs – and for making beautiful artwork.

For today’s Fun Friday post, I want to share with you the masterpieces of Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 73-year-old man who uses a software program designed to crunch numbers for a completely different purpose – drawing.  Horiuchi uses the autoshape feature in Excel to fashion these amazing pictures, and even won an art contest in 2006 for his designs.  You can read more about Horiuchi here.

What I like about Horiuchi’s work is that it is a prime example of one of the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. tools that we teach our gifted students – “Put to Another Use.”  I’ll warrant that not many of us have opened an Excel spreadsheet and thought, “This would be a wonderful media for creating art.”

Now if I can just figure out how to make Microsoft Paint balance my checking account…