Art Session: Painting a Portrait Using Instant Coffee Process - Giving it a Go!

Exploring Coffee Painting and Learning about this Medium

Hello Steemit community! Today I will be sharing my experience, along with the process of using an instant coffee powder as a painting medium. I have seen quite a number of artist who uses the same medium in their paintings and the results are very impressive.

I'd say that coffee kind of creates that vintage look when used as paint. The monochromatic effect produced by coffee, which I pick to say - the sepia scheme, is stunning even though it is only a single shade of color just having different values. I have tried using coffee years ago but that was barely a full on painting. Those were just a few scribbles and dabs, just sort of an experiment out of curiosity. I haven't really tried using coffee seriously on a piece. So now, I finally decided to give it shot and go right into coffee painting.

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As always, I got my reference photo from Usplash where there are tons of images uploaded by users which we can freely download and use for personal and commercial purposes. It had been my favorite imaging site for weeks now and I've been hanging around the site finding photos to use as subjects in my artworks. Luckily, I found this user named Éva Balogh which has amazing photography uploads and so I picked one from her collection and used it as my reference subject.

Photo Reference from Éva Balogh on Unsplash

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PREPARING THE MATERIALS

The materials I used are the instant coffee powder, Berkeley watercolor paper, a graphite pencil, three paint brushes with different sizes, painting palette, and of course water.

I mixed up five different shades of coffee in my palette starting from the lightest one to the darkest. In the middle is the coffee powder so I can easily remix shades when I ran out of them. I will refer to them as the darkest shade, dark shade, middle shade, light shade, and lightest shade.

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SKETCHING THE REFERENCE

I sketched the girl using my HB graphite pencil fist. I always do an underpainting sketch in every painting that I make because I want my paintings to be accurate. If I'm in a rush, I could have painted directly but that would not be as precise as I would want it to be. It took me a lot of erasing and re-sketching before I got satisfied of my sketch and then I cleaned it up by darkening all the important parts like the eyebrows, hair, lips, and face/body outlines.

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PAINTING PROCESS

Step 1: I started out with a light wash on entire face using the lightest shade of coffee mixed with a lot more water. I want to first build up the shadows and values of the face before painting the eyes, nose, lips, etc.

Step 2: Before the initial wash got dry, I continued to add layers of mixes to tone up the face and then defined the darker areas by dropping blobs of the mid shade mixture to build up shadows. This is supposed to emphasize the contours, or the curves of the face so that it would not look cartoonish. Then I decided to paint the eyebrows and eyes using the darkest shade. Since I did not have a white gel pen, I just carefully blocked in the eyes with the darkest paint while retaining the white space at the lower top to provide a highlight.

Step 3: After doing the eyes, I proceeded to paint the nose and the lips. I used the mid shade and dark shade mix in the sides and the point of the nose to fill in the dark areas. I used the same combination in the lips, as well as with the eyes. I just gradually painted the lips and retained the white where it's supposed to be, and I got very careful not to fill in the whites since again, that's the only way I get to achieve the highlights.

Step 4: Freckles! I really don't know how to paint freckles the right way, so I just studied the reference and slowly dotted the face with the tip of the brush. Since I don’t have a detail brush, I used the smallest brush that I have. I used the mid shade and the light shade mix in this. I did this while keeping track of where and how clustered and narrow the freckles are by constantly looking at the reference photo.

Step 5: Another wash on her sweater. I layered the lightest shade, dropped some blobs on darker areas using the middle shade, and the darker ones using the dark shade of coffee.

Step 6: Moving on to the hair, I did a wash on the entire area using the middle shade. Then I dropped blobs of dark shade at the sides closer to the face to emphasize some values.

Step 7: After getting the wash done and achieving the values that I want, I then added the curls. I painted long, thin curvy hair strands using the dark shade starting from the side at the top of the face, to the bottom. Then, I started darkening the bottom left of the hair by making thick curly strands toward the sides of the sweater using the darkest shade. I also added some checkered lines on the sweater as details.

Step 8: Lastly, I added more light curls at the sides of the hair and then darkened the inner parts. I realized that I left out her neck unpainted so I dipped through the middle shade and painted the area, blending in the dark shade from the corner to provide shadow. I finished the painting by adding dark curls throughout the entire hair, then I added more shadows on the sweater.

Here is the finished painting:

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Overall, painting with coffee isn’t really a bad idea to think about since you can get really beautiful monochromatic paintings using it. I think it’s great how we can produce art even with a common household supply. I’ve learned that you can’t just trust the color saturation you are dealing with the first time you paint the coffee because once it’s dry, it really changes in color and goes dull. One thing I noticed apart from the color result is the stickiness of the coffee paint, specially the really dark tones I applied. I don’t like that it sticks with every paper I put on top while covering it. Apart from these, it is still a great medium to work with especially if you are aiming for that vintage look in your paintings. I still love it, and will continue to do more paintings using coffee soon no matter how sticky it gets!

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How do you feel about Coffee Painting? Have you tried any other unique medium other than instant coffee?

Share your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below so we can talk about art. I’d really love to hear from you guys!

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Check out my recent blogs:

• Painting an Orange Using a Negative Reference Tutorial
• Simple Inverted Drawing of a Cat

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Thank you for reading!

I will post more creative content soon so if you'd like, you can follow me to get updated.

Have a great day everyone!

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