Coffee & Ink - Drawing Practice

Before you jump to conclusion, this is not art, I mean I would not call it art, I was just trying out how these materials behave with the substances I used, so let's call it practice and you'll see why.

Honestly, I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll just cut to the chase and write it as it comes.

Many years ago, in 2018 I believe it was, when I joined the legacy chain with this account, there was a guy, who was painting with instant coffee. I've never seen anything like that before and for me it was before I started drawing, so needless to say, it had an impact on me and admired his work a lot. Unfortunately he stopped posting, I have unfollowed him at some point, then a year or two later I have spent two days trying to find his profile. (That was a good lesson to not unfollow someone just because they have stopped posting.)

I remember I was watching this guy posting his coffee paintings and was thinking how marvelous and that I need to try it out, so I bought a couple of packets of instant coffee and seven years passed till I started painting with them. Yeah, I took my time.

Main Idea

The main idea here was to try out painting with instant coffee, but painting is a strong word and not really suitable for what I have done. I wanted to get an old looking background, so I used old paper from an old book and applied instant coffee to it to make it look older.

Then I thought what can I draw on it and remembered I had some plans with my old drawings, among which there were houses, castles and so on.

So first I defined the title, which is Piecing Life Together, then came the execution. Why piecing life together? You'll find out when time comes.

Materials Used:

A4 watercolor sheet, 210x297mm, 230g/m2,
old book paper,
universal transparent liquid glue,
Jakobs Krönung instant coffee,
0.4 Pelikan fineliner,
0.5mm pencil,
size 14 brush.

I find this paper very good for my needs, reliable and thick enough to not make problems.

In case someone doesn't know what instant coffee is, here it is.

This is how it started. Had the paper from the old book, to serve as background and had to glue the pieces to the paper.

My first plan was to glue the pieces to the paper and leave some space between them, like it would be cracked, but I've already done one like that, so after some thinking I chose to glue them one on top of the other, overlapping them.

This is where the fun started. The main idea when using instant coffee is to create different shades, by adding more, or less instant coffee to water. I tries two as for me this mix served as base, or background, but if you're painting with it an only use coffee and ink, you most likely will need more, like 5 - 6 colors/shades.

This is how the wet paper looked like. I tried to add darker coffee to some parts, especially where the paper was darker. My biggest concern was how the glue and the coffee mix will behave, but to my surprise, there were no problems. I let the paper dry for 24h, after gluing, and only applied the coffee after the 24h was up.

This is what I got after the paper was completely dry.

Why piecing life together? Well, as you could see, I used some old, torn paper, which symbolizes broken life here. I bet we have all had a period, when our life was torn apart and we had to start over, putting the broken pieces together. That's this phase of my work.

Then came the building phase, when we had to rebuild everything from the ground.

Working with old paper has its disadvantages. There was not sketching possibility here, just a few lines, the basics, the rest is freehand using ink, because you can't use eraser on this paper.

This was a nice learning experience as I had to figure out how to best use the fineliner, to avoid getting to much ink in one spot and it's really a challenge as there's no possibility to correct anything here.

... and voilà! Here's the rebuilt life, with holes, damages and inequalities. I didn't have much time, so I made it simple and childish as well. Sometimes it's good to work without any pressure, after all this was just to test how coffee looks on this paper and see how the ink works, to see how to hold the pen and how much pressure to apply. Without any talent, you can't expect much 😆

I made this collage in 2022, to see how the old paper looks like with while base and ink, but I didn't use coffee here.

Maybe one day, when I'll have more time, I'll try to create something serious 😬 You can't do much in 20 minutes.

For now, I like hot the old paper and coffee looks like and have another idea of what I could do with it.

If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides: