Artist Turns Coffee, Tea & Fruit Juice Stains Into Whimsical Art

By Dorothy Tan, 05 Dec 2012

While most people consider beverage stains to be unwelcomed hassles, illustrator and graphic designer Angela Mercedes Donna Otto deliberately created them so as to turn them into art.

Randomly pouring and sprinkling tea, coffee and fruit juice onto paper canvases, she makes chaotic, splotchy patterns—which she will then muse over, looking for familiar shapes.

Using techniques of “apophenia”—the human’s natural tendency to construct order, meaning and form from chaotic structures—she draws over the messy patterns, turning them into discernable faces and forms of animals and human-like characters.

Her works reflect the poetic coming together of the random and the controlled—scroll down for more of her amazing stain art.