Painting with coffee

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Sara Walker

If you’ve tried baking with coffee, drinking it, composting the used grounds and using it as a beauty treatment, how about getting touch with your creative side by painting with coffee? Several artists now create watercolour-style paintings using nothing but coffee – and some also incorporate coffee grounds to add texture.

Thai artist Pornchai Lerthammasiri has been using the medium for several years, creating beautiful, monotone landscapes with coffee. He started experimenting after learning about the ancient Chinese art of painting with tea, and soon found the stronger colour of coffee more suited to painting. It’s taken him six years to perfect the technique so that the finished painting will stand the test of time and not deteriorate. He uses different strengths of coffee to achieve different shades, and the resulting picture has a vintage, sepia appearance.

“When I want to paint waterfalls or a distant mountain, I use the spray bottle to soften the pictures. There are various results that only the brush alone cannot achieve,” he said, in an interview in Preaw – Weekend, a leading Thai magazine.

American artists Angel Sarkela-Saur and Andrew Saur have also embraced the medium – they own the Coffee Art website, and have been painting with coffee for over ten years. They enjoy creating fine art out of something so universal and readily available as coffee, and their work has appeared in exhibitions in several European countries as well as in the U.S. According to Andrew, their coffee art has “attracted a strong following”.

Many artists prefer to use instant coffee for painting, as it’s easier to control the strength and therefore the colour intensity. Once mixed, the liquid is used just like watercolour paint, with varying amounts of water added to produce different shades. It takes a little practice to get it right, as the coffee mixture is stickier and more difficult to work with than standard paint – so you might want to switch on the coffee machine to have a little caffeine yourself before you make a start!

Coffee Bean Creativity

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Sara Walker

Things To Do With Coffee Beans

You probably love drinking them, maybe even roasting them but have you ever made art with them?

From detailed paintings of landscapes in different shades of brown to stencilled coffee cup lattes, coffee beans are a versatile medium.

This year, two artists stood out – Hong Yi for her interesting coffee cup ring paintings and Arkadi Kim for breaking the world record for the longest coffee bean mosaic.

Japanese based artist, Hong Yi created a painting of the singer Jay Chou using the bottom of her coffee cup. It seems that Yi embraced the coffee ring stain that most of us hate. Her technique involved dipping the bottom of her cup in coffee and then creating hundreds of rings on her canvas to create intricate works of art.

Also this year, Russian artist Arkadi Kim, broke the world record for the largest coffee bean mosaic which was created and displayed in Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow for one month over the summer.

The mural, which was appropriately titled ‘Awakening’ took approximately one million coffee beans to make and measured almost 30 square metres. The different colours were created by roasting the coffee beans for different amounts of time – now that’s an example of painstaking dedication!

Impressively, the large scale coffee bean masterpiece took Kim and his team of five assistants only two weeks to complete and involved gluing different shades of coffee beans, one at a time onto a large board.

The finished result was a girl’s face with a cup of coffee and lots of swirly lines resembling the wonderful aroma of coffee – although, we think the girl could have looked a bit more cheerful.

To complete the exhibition, a temporary coffee shop equipped with good quality coffee machines and some comfy seats was set up in the park so visitors could get the full coffee bean experience.

Coffee Art

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Sara Walker

Coffee is one of the world’s most popular drinks so not surprisingly it has inspired artists to create some stunning and/or interesting artwork. And we feel sure the day Damien Hirst decides to make coffee into art (like perhaps framing a few beans dotted about in the shape of coffee molecules…) we will see an unprecedented rise in the price of coffee beans. We are still waiting.

Coffee art is an interesting topic for anyone who owns a coffee shop, loves coffee, or sells coffee in any way, shape, or form, as it can compliment your existing stock, or add some colour to the walls of your coffee shop, or home.

We found coffee jewellery from Shay Aaron, an Israeli artist based out of Tel Aviv, below you can see coffee bean earrings and coffee cup cufflinks. He has many more though, if you visit his site: http://www.etsy.com/shop/shayaaron

Coffee bean cuff links Black Coffee Cuff links

Of course you can also turn your latte into art – perfect way to impress your guests. In fact a café can probably make quite a name just for the sake of the art that goes into the cup! The world’s Latte Art Championship will take place in Nice, 26-28th of June 2013.

You can actually make art using your beans as well. The below painting, painted by Karen Eland was made using only coffee and water!

There have also been sculptures made around coffee and one is the Yuanyang II by Tsang Cheung Shing from Hong Kong. It was made for a pottery exhibition of YingYeung, which is a drink made of coffee and tea combined. The artwork then went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Another sculpture focused around coffee is Coffee Man by Ruth Jensen. Coffee is such a world-wide phenomena that probably anyone from a big city can recognise themselves, or fellow city dwellers in the man’s pose. Who does not stop to have a coffee ever so often, or run past someone else who is?

Arkadi Kim has made the world’s largest coffee bean mosaic. It measures 30 square meters and weighs 180 kilos! It took two weeks to piece together with the help of his team. They had to roast the beans themselves to get the different colour nuances. The mosaic is called The Awakening and portrays a girl smelling the aroma of coffee. We figure that maybe the artist needed quite a lot of coffee to stay awake whilst making this piece!