Easy Instant Coffee Painting! Fun Techniques & Mini Illustrations

1. Trailer: I am the sweet smell of coffee. Well, how about instead of drinking your morning cup of Joe, let's paint with it. All you really need is instant coffee, brushes and watercolor paper. If you've never tried watercolors before, painting with coffee is a great introduction because it's so similar and is more forgiving of mistakes. If you are a seasoned watercolors, painting with coffee is and must try because it forces you to work in monochrome and increases your skills in using different values. But really it's just so much fun to paint with something new and to smell the sweet scent of coffee all day long. No joke.My studio, my brushes, my table, everything smell like coffee for a whole week during the filming of this class. I'll walk you guys through everything you need to know and I'll show you all the weird quirks that only coffee painting has. Then we'll do three fun mini illustrations that you can follow along with. You'll see the techniques in action and it'll give you a good idea of how to go about it and whatever illustration style you want to create. So what are you waiting for? Make yourself a hot cup of coffee and let's make some coffee art. 2. Supplies: Hey guys, welcome to the class. Let's start with a quick overview of supplies. You will need instant coffee. Any kind should do the trick. But if you go shopping just for this class, pick the one with the darkest looking coffee crystals so you get the darkest shades. If you avoid real coffee, but have an alternative drink like this one, you can try it out and see if it works like coffee. I find that the Cafix brand works very similar to real coffee. So if you had that lying around, you can use it instead of instant coffee, as you can see, is just as easy to make lights and darks and the behavior is very similar. If you're wondering if you can use normal coffee, the answer is probably not. It's only okay for light washes and maybe backgrounds to some other artwork that you do. The problem is you can't make darker shades in the lightest one. So you would be very limited to making only very light paintings. That's why it has to be instant. Or you could maybe use Turkish coffee, which is boiled coffee that's extremely concentrated. But if you do go that route, just be aware that you will have little specks of coffee granules in your art, which is a fun texture if you think about it. Now the second most important thing is brushes. Watercolor brushes are the best for this, but you can use whatever you have as long as the bristles are soft like these, even super cheap brushes work perfectly. Just be sure to avoid hard bristles like these. This is usually used for oil painting, not watercolors or coffee painting. If you do have brushes like this, you can experiment with them and make cool textures. But not for normal painting, I will be mostly using these four brushes, a five zero spotter for tiny details, and a size two and a six and ten for bigger things. The size of the brushes will depend on how big you like to work. I personally like working really small and I encourage you to do the same if you want to follow along with the projects and get the most practice out because smaller pieces take less time and you're less scared to mess up. So as long as you're learning, I recommend you work tiny too. You can also get away with just one medium or large brush or just a tiny brush and a big brush. As for paper, you will also need to use watercolor paper that is at least 140 pounds. This helps to minimize warping because we're going to be using a lot of water. My favorite paper is as Canson XL paper. It's amazing because it's so cheap and holds up well, it's also fairly smooth, even though it's cold pressed. I will be using it throughout the class. You will also want to have a piece of paper towel on hand to help pick up excess coffee and fix mistakes and one water container to clean your brush and add more water to your coffee. The last thing you will need is either a mixing tray with wells like this one, or tiny cups or plates to hold different shades of coffee. I can paint paintings with just one container with the darkest color, but I only recommend this if you're a seasoned watercolor artists, if you're new to watercolor or never tried before, do a bunch of wells like I am. You're good to go with three or four containers or you could do more or less, that's up to you. You might also consider investing in artists masking tape. If you tape down your page before you start working, it won't work as much and if you plan on using lots of water in the background, I highly recommend you do so or else this will happen and will make it very hard to paint. But this isn't necessary because in the many illustrations that I will show later on, I won't be using any masking tape. So it's really if you're just going to be using a lot of water. Some additional supplies you might want to have are a pencil, make sure it's very light. I use [inaudible] to keep it light, but any pencil will do as well if you just press down lightly on it, just make sure it's erasable. I will also be using a normal spoon to scoop out the coffee and a dropper to add water to it in a more controlled way. One thing you will also see me use is this white uni ball signal broad point gel pen. I love using this thing and I use it in all my watercolor works. I just use it to add a little white highlights when I'm done with my pieces. But this is completely optional. So now that you have everything you need, let's learn the basics of how to paint with coffee. 3. The Basics: Let's start out with the basics of painting with coffee. Get out your tiny cups, if you have a pallete with multiple wells that can be even easier to use, now scoop up your coffee with a spoon or whatever is easiest, and put different amounts into each well. As you can see, the first one is super strong, lots of coffee, and then I put in less and less coffee in each subsequent one. I made four different values, but you can do less or more, it's a personal preference. Then add water to your coffee, dissolve it. I'm using a dropper to have full control of how much water I put in. If it looks like your coffee isn't dissolving, try using warmer or even hot water, but mine is all just fine with room temperature water. Notice why I add the most water to the lighter tones and slightly less than the darker ones. The more water you add, the more it dilutes the coffee and makes it lighter. Now mix the coffee with the brush and clean the brush in between mixes to make sure you keep the same values. The darkest tone should be gooey and thick compared to lighter ones. Get out a piece of scrap paper to test out your values, and always do this before you start painting, because you can accidentally make two similar shades or make one lighter, or darker than you wanted. It's easy to fix by adding more coffee or more water. As you can see, my first color is dark, but also thick. The next colors are more like watercolor because their watery, with the lightest barely visible. Now we have different values easily accessible to us without having to worry about mixing the right ratio of water to coffee every time we pickup coffee paint. You can also make beautiful blending by using lighter washes and then adding darker values or even just water for beautiful plumes. You will see this more in the future. If you want to use just one container, then just use lots of coffee to water to make that gooey mixture, and a little with water as you need straight on the page, or by controlling how much paint to pick up and how wet your brushes, this is something you learn from experience, and if you are a seasoned watercolor artists, or you want to challenge, you can try it out. But I recommend if you're a beginner, you do it with a couple of different values. Now, let's try to make a gradient wash. All that means, is we're going from super dark to the light of the page gradually. Take out a piece of scrap paper and try to do this with me. Just pick up your darkest color and then paint in a rectangle. Then clean your brush and pick up the lighter color, and continue doing this and then end it with just clean water. You will notice it's hard to control the coffee, because it likes to move around when there's water involved. You can see that by how the darkest color collected at the edges here. For this reason, I don't recommend using a hairdryer when you're painting is very wet because you'll easily move around the coffee too much. Instead, always wait a little bit until it's halfway dry and most of the water soaked up, and then you can use a hairdryer set on low to carefully speed up the drying process. But our coffee did keep the overall gradient that we want it, so, you can easily make them. Just be aware how wet or dry the pages when you add darker coffee paint. In this way, you can control how much it spreads. Another thing to notice about coffee painting, is the darkest parts of our coffee paint take a very long time to dry compared to the lighter parts. The darkest parts dry, thick, gooey, and shiny. This is part of the appeal and strangeness of this medium. I think it makes it more fun that there are glossy and mud parts in one painting. It just keeps it coffee like. But keep in mind that the gooey coffee that you paint will stay shiny once it's dry when working on your piece. If you only want to matte look, then don't use super concentrated coffee paint, just use lighter ones and layer it. Before we move on to advanced techniques, I want you to one more thing, coffee is not very good at layering with transparency. By that, I mean, if you go in Photoshop and you have two layers, and he put the passage down, you can see the first one below it. But if I do this with coffee, it reactivates the previously dry layers and the whole shape becomes darker, not just where they overlap because it picked up the previous coffee and build on the whole shape. It's very reactive to water and very easy to reactivated. You can only very slightly see the edges of the previous layer, but barely. We can still easily make dimensional works, since most of the time, you don't care if the previous layer edges shows through, but it's something to keep in mind when painting. But just like watercolor, always work light to dark, planned out the values of each part beforehand, this will help a lot. Also make sure to leave the whiter the page somewhere near composition for the highest contrast. This is one of the paintings I did when learning the medium. As you can see, the end result is really dark and murky. I made the mistake of not planning what will be lighter and darker beforehand, and I didn't leave a lot of water at the page and overlayer. The result is a similar dark value throughout the piece, because we don't have pitch black and coffee painting and I ruin the light, it just feels lifeless because of that,. Unlike this simpler composition in which I painted using one layer with a dark center and then use lighter coffee paint on the outside you see how beautifully blended. Then I played around with dark to light again and the leaves, I also added a nice splatter to make brooms and textures, and I left the puddles be and they dried beautifully. Notice how this is just one layer, this was achieved by using different values and letting the coffee do it's or magical thing with the water. I also left a lot of whitespace within the rows and in the background. So it easily pops off the page at us. Now I can easily add detail and more layers if I want to, just keep in mind that it will layer by picking up the coffee from the previous layer and making the value darker. But the point is, your paintings can be as simple as this one layer and just tiny details, and still have lots of charm. Don't worry about layering or leaving whitespace too much, you'll see how I approach it in the future many illustrations. Now that we know the basics of coffee painting, let's learn some more advanced and super fun techniques. 4. Advanced Techniques: Now that we know the basics, let's get into more advanced stuff. You probably already know this technique. Sputter is super fun to use with coffee. All you have to do is load a brush with coffee and water or just water if you want to add a set of texture to an already finished piece and tap it on your finger. The smaller the brush, the smaller the dots. The bigger the brush, the bigger the dots. If you've never done sputter before, just take out a piece of scrap paper and give it a try with your different brushes. Now what makes it super cool with coffee is that the coffee easily react with water as you saw earlier. So that means that our dots will disturb the previous coffee layers and make a cool texture in your art, or you can use paper towel right after the sputter to essentially erase the coffee below it. Isn't this awesome? It picks up any paint with water on it. You can also use a moist brush to pick up already dry coffee paint and control how much you pick up to make the effect very subtle. Or you can just take off all the paint as well, or even just get to wipe the page back completely. Water in a paper towel are essentially an eraser. So you can always pick up excess coffee or add detail in a lighter value by just writing the shape you want and using a paper towel or moist brush. This is the coolest thing about coffee to me, that beginners don't have to be afraid of making mistakes because you can essentially erase anything you do. Cool, right? Another thing that I discovered is that salt works with coffee in the same way that it works with watercolor. This means that if you make a coffee background and sprinkle in salt while it's still wet and then let it dry, you will get this super awesome and electrifying texture. Just be sure to wait for it to fully dry before gently rubbing it off with your fingers. As you've learned so far, coffee is very reactive to water. So we can essentially make blooms and beautiful background just like using watercolor. Here's an example mini-project for a fun coffee background to lettering or an illustration or coffee painting, whatever you want to do. I use masking tape to tape down my paper because we're going to be using a lot of water in the background. Then I go in with a wet brush, and wet most of the page. Notice how I leave lots of white pages as well. I don't wet everything completely. I want those little specks of whites to show through. Then I drop in more concentrated coffee in the right corner for a nice contrast with the left side and I let it blend. I also add a splatter to the rest of the piece with more concentrated coffee as well, I then drop in plain water around the piece for beautiful blooms, and now I add salt. Notice that the coffee and water are doing their own thing. They're creating this gorgeous background with only a small push for me. I'm not making the magic, I'm just letting them make the magic. I add in a little more sputter and let it dry. Once it's fully dry, I can rub off the salt my fingers and for the final touch, I'm going to imprint this leaf into the background by just painting on the back with coffee and then pressing it down around the piece. This created a subtle and beautiful texture and you can use this technique with anything that has a texture to it, like flowery ways, for example. Now we have a beautiful, gorgeous background to do whatever you want to on. I use Sepia colored Micron pens to draw in the leaf and a brush pen to add lettering. You could do whatever you want at to stage. This is just one idea. But the point is you can use coffee in a creative way to add to your art. It doesn't have to be the only thing you use, you can mix other media with it as well. Now that we've got the basics advanced techniques done, let's do three mini-projects to learn how to actually paint with coffee. Let's put everything we've learned together. I made this project simpler enough for you to follow along. But even just watching, it will give you an understanding of how to paint with coffee. The you can illustrate whatever you like using the same techniques. Just be sure to practice what you learn so you don't forget it. Remember, you can only truly learn by doing. I didn't read a book and then teach you guys all these techniques. I just sat down, took my coffee out and painted and learned and saw how it acts and how it reacts. I did experiments and now I can teach you. So learn by doing guys. Go grab your watercolor paper, your coffee, sit down and paint with me. 5. Coffee Time!: In this first mini illustration, we're going to make this loose outline of a coffee cup with a bunch of textures, loose outlines, and just fun stuff going on here. This is the easiest out of the three illustrations and it's the most loose, so no sketching is required. This will help for keeping the piece loose. Let's start. Pick up your second darkest color and paint in a loose oval. It doesn't have to touch all around. In fact, it looks much better if it doesn't. Now paint in half an oval again, with the lines barely touching and then two curved lines for the handle. None of this has to be super accurate. The human brain will see it as coffee, no matter how loose it is. While the coffee painting is still wet, you can drop in darker colors, make the lines vary in value, or even just water. Now do another oval around the cup for the plate and to fill in the cup with coffee, just add a curved line here and fill it in but leave a little bit of white for the highlighting. You can also hint at the bottom of the cup and the inner circle of the plate with more simple lines or don't. It's up to you how simply you want it to be. I wanted to add in some steam and make it form into a cute heart, so I take the lightest color and paint upward from the coffee. Notice how loose my strokes are. I'll add lines around the hinted heart shape. Even if you stop painting here, you already have a loos and awesome coffee cup painting, painted with just coffee. How cool is that? You didn't even sketch it. The different values that we use for making the outline make it interesting and it will dry beautifully. Next, I add in a splatter for a fun touch and add more lines around the mist. Using a clean and almost dry brush, I pick up excess coffee at the bottom of the steam to lighten it. It got a little dark in that area for me. You can do this to lighten any part of the composition while it's still wet and if it's dry, just use a moist brush and paper towel like I showed earlier. I wanted to add some lettering to the piece but you don't have to do that. I mostly use the darkest coffee paint so that the letters stand out and are as dark as can be. I also add light lines above and below the lettering just to make it stand out more and paint in some coffee beans on the plate for a cute detail. For a fun touch, I painted around the bottom of my empty cup of coffee and stamped that around the piece for an imprint of a coffee cup bottom. Then I add a little bit more splatter, and took the lightest coffee color and mostly water, and painted in a loose background. This fades out some of the imprints and make them blur in and out. I also use a paper towel to make the background even later, but picking up excess coffee paint. Then I added splatter one more time, which blends out on the slightly wet background and makes fun blooms and textures. This is my secret to make dreamy backgrounds. Just have a white background and add a splatter. Once I'm happy with the background, I decide to make the outline of the coffee cup even darker so it stands out from the background more. Drop in dark coffee paint in the outline and then the steam. This is easy to do while it's still wet. You can always add more water or darker paint while it's wet. Be sure to eyeball it and do so. Then I let it dry and add in some last details on the mist by just adding more lines and layers. I use a white gel pen to add little white dots once it's fully dry. This adds a little magical touch and we're done. This was super easy to make and it has lots of charm. It definitely has a coffee feel to it. The point is you don't have to get fancy with the painting techniques. You can get playful and loose with fun backgrounds, using lettering. Do simple outlines for making alive and interesting pieces and just whatever you want to do. Experiment guys, experiment and you'll find super cool techniques. Now let's do something a little bit more advanced and a lot cuter. You know I like cute things. 6. Cutie Patootie Penguin: Now let's get a little more advanced by painting the super cutie, penguin cutie, so cute. Let's begin. Start off by sketching out a pearl or egg shape. Next, sketch in lawn, curved lines on each side for the arms and little curved lines for the feet. Add a triangle for the beak and two lawn dots for the eyes. Keep in mind that you can play with the shapes, placement and how you draw things. Don't be afraid to do this in your own style. Now sketch out curved lines from the beak to the ends of the head and around the hands. We're just marking what we'll make darker and you're done with a basic sketch. Now you can make it more complex if you want. I decided to make him hold a balloon. I simply drew in a curved line at the end of his arm, not all the way at the bottom because it'll be longer, just a little bit within. You have to imagine it actually bending. I sketch the balloon that he's holding. Its just a simple balloon shape. Just give it a try, you can do it. He doesn't have to be holding a balloon either. You can add whatever accessories you like. I also lightly sketched out snow below him so he's not floating in space, but this is optional. He'd look fine without a background. Now, I take a super light concentration of coffee and paint in the super light part of his body. Then I pick up a slightly darker value and add it in around the bottom insights. Notice how it blends out. It makes him feel dimensional. I do the same thing with the balloon, but be sure to paint around a highlight, which is just an oval or a circle or whatever you want it to be. This makes it look shiny and like a real balloon. The white page is our white. Be sure to know what you want to keep white before you start, unless you have some other white media you can use on top. I add darker coffee water at the edge of the balloon to make it more dimensional as well. I want the bottom part of his body to be a little darker, so I simply drop in a little more darker coffee at the edges. You can always drop in more while it's still wet for a subtle gradient change. Next, I take my lightest color and loosely hint at the snow with loose strokes. Be sure to keep bits of white at the page. Now if you don't want your illustration to bleed a lot and be loose, be sure to wait for the first layer to dry before going on to the next parts. I'm going to be adding the darker parts now, but I really like the loose look so I don't wait for it to dry. I just pick up the darkest color and paint in the dark areas. Notice how it instantly bleeds when it touches the lighter area because it's still wet. I can easily control how much oblique we get by simply cleaning him. I'm drying my brush. I'm picking up excess coffee and water. I'm just softening the intensity of the coffee in these areas. Don't you worry about making mistakes because coffee is so easy to erase after it's dried too. I'm also painting his little feed dark, nothing fancy here, just simple ovals. Then I add more dark paint to the dark parts to make sure it stays dark because it instantly got lighter as it bled away and mix with the water. I also add a little more to the edge of the balloon to make the value change more intense. Now I add a smallest splatter and wait for it to dry. Once it's fully dry, I go back in with my darkest color and start adding more detail. I outline his beak, his little eyes, his paws, the balloons string and just him in general. I also pick up a light value and add some loose strokes around him to make a fur texture. Then I pick up a slightly darker value and outline the edges of the snow. Now I cleanse, sightly damping my brush and it's time to erase to create some subtle highlights. I do so anywhere I like, by just painting there with the barely wet brush. Be sure your brush is not soaking wet because it will be harder to control and harder to make it subtle. Make sure it's just slightly moist. This picks up coffee from the already dry area. It's a very subtle value change, but we can easily control how strong it is and the shape of it with the brush. Be sure to clean your brush often when doing this. I add highlights at the top of his head, inside the balloon to make it super shiny in his little flipper and even in the shadows of his lighter areas around his tummy. It's up to you how much you want to do this, but this really helps him to pop and to feel dimensional. I'm also going back in with a darker color and adding a free texture around the outline. This is optional, but it's fun to do. Also, there was too much bleed on the left side, so I simply picked up some water and painted over it and then I picked it up with a paper towel to lighten it even more. I continue darkening and lighting areas as I see fit by just adding more dark paint or by lifting with my brush and add a subtle splatter and use a paper towel to lift it. This is optional, but it makes it look like snow is falling and add a bigger splatter in the background to continue the effect. Once it's fully dry, you can see that we're done. But I wasn't. I added some white highlights of my favorite gel pen around the piece, and then I took the darker paint value and painted in some tiny eyelashes in a simple ball. Just with this little touch, we changed his gender into a female, or maybe he's a guy, he just likes bows. That's okay too. Now, it's complete. I hope watching the process gave you a better idea of how to paint with coffee and maybe you follow along, major on penguin. If so share in the project gallery. I'd love to see your little cutie and so with the other students. If you want to learn about how to drag cute animals, people or foods, I have classes on all of that. You could try drawing a cutie for one of those classes, and then paint it with techniques you learned in this class to make a unique coffee cutie. Now let's do a really fun and loose painting for the last mini illustration. 7. Simple & Loose Cabin: In this last minute illustration, we're going to make this super charming and simple painting. But for all its simplicity, it has a lot of dimension. If you want to follow along surface sketching a circle or an easier way is to just trace over something that is already in the shape of a circle like I did here, this is actually a really simple hack that I use all the time because circles are hard. Now sketch out your composition. I wanted a simple cabin on a hill, so let's start with a simple curve line for the hill and then I draw in a simple house using simple shapes and I even sketch out smoke coming from the chimney using long wavy lines. Next I need to plan out where the pine trees will go. I do so by lightly sketching out triangles around the composition. You can put them where I put them or do them your own way, it doesn't matter. I also sketch out mountains behind the home using wavy lines. Once you're done planning, you can start painting. Remember with coffee just like watercolor, you want to start with the lightest parts of the composition. I take my lightest paint value and fill in the mountains, the field around the house, and the smoke from a chimney. Now, like I said earlier, if you don't want your artwork to be as loose as mine, you can wait for this first layer to dry, but I like the bleeds that are made. I pick up a mix of the two darkest values and start painting in the trees with super loose strokes. Pine trees are just triangles that are shrubby. Just be sure to leave random bits of white space like I do. Don't worry so much about doing it right. This is loose and the human brain can recognize it for what it is easily. Notice how the darkest paint went to the edges, because there was a lot of water down here. I use a paper towel to lighten it more on the right side to make it match left. Otherwise, I really like how it blurred and the dark edges are a nice contrast. If you don't like them, you can pick them up with a paper towel. Now wait for your lightest parts to dry fully and pick up your darkest value again. I started painting the roof. Notice how I use straight lines and leave a lot of white space in between them on purpose. I then outline the windows and fill in the door. I also outline the house and now I'm done with the darkest parts. I take a slightly lighter value and paint in the house by also doing straight lines. This is just giving it a really nice texture and making a pop more. I even draw in some vertical lines to make it look like short pieces of wood. By leaving specs and lines of white of the page, we give this house a lot of texture, dimension, and looseness. Now I take my darker value and painting little bits of grass at the edges of the house. This is super simple to do and adds a nice touch and grounds it. I pick up my darkest color again and paint in the trees. As the first layer is dry, whatever I put down will not bleed and will hold its shape perfectly. I keep it loose like always and make sure that the further the trees are from the camera, the smaller they are. I even paint in their trunks with the same color. I also add a second layer to the smoke from the house with a slightly darker color and I make sure to keep it loose and add strokes around it as well. I even add in tiny dots for a cute touch. Next I paint in some bigger grass loosely at the bottom the composition just to help it balance more and add interest. You don't have to do this, but I add a splatter like always and I add more dark coffee around piece, and I'm done. Just eyeball your piece and see if it can use more dark somewhere, or more light somewhere, or silhouette, and then let it dry. Once it is fully dry, I go back in and erase the edges of my circle and any other pencil marks that show through. Be very careful when doing this because you can accidentally smear the darkest parts of the coffee painting, if they're are even slightly wet. They take a long time to dry and they stay gooey for a while. For the last touch, I use my white gel pen to add highlights and we're done. This is super cute and was super easy and fun to paint. As you can see, coffee painting is easier than it looks because you have the power to erase. In this painting, I did a neat erase, but knowing that I could takes the edge off and the fear away of making mistakes, so just try it out. Just keep in mind to always plan out what will be the darkest parts and the lightest parts before you start, and you're good to go. If you don't know how to plan it out in your head, you could easily do a thumbnail sketch before you start, I even have a class on that. But it's really just a tiny sketch of what you're going to do. Now let's wrap up the class. 8. Your Turn! :): I hope this class answered all your coffee painting questions and your itching to start already did. If you still have questions just leave on the community section of the class. Otherwise, I can't wait to see what you make. Painting with coffee like any other skill takes practice, so sit down at your desk and start. Even if you fail, you will learn a lot and you room will smell delicious. I hope class give you all the tools to get started and make some yummy paintings. If you're not too shy to show your work, do so in the project gallery or tag me on Instagram. You want to check more of my classes, I have tons of them, from watercolors, to inks, to drawing, to cuties classes and there are thousands of classes here on Skillshare to keep you occupied for ever. Happy learning my friends and keep making art. I'll see you in the next class.