The Wonderful Word for This Wednesday is Coffee

**If you are not a coffee drinker, just insert ‘tea’ in place of the word ‘coffee’ as you read on.  If you’re not a coffee or tea drinker, well, I’m sorry about that.

I LOVE COFFEE!  My favorite cup of coffee is a very dark, robust roast with my own homemade almond milk creamer made to perfection.  That morning cup of coffee each day is a gift, and I only have one so it’s got to be good.  I’m already thinking about it as I’m getting ready for bed the night before.  Am I alone?  I don’t think so.

“Let’s have coffee” also brings happy thoughts.  When someone says, “Let’s have coffee” it means, let’s get together in person and connect.  The smell of a coffee shop brings warm cozy vibes, and people, alone or with friends, are generally happy in coffee shops.  Coffee houses are  generally places with good feels.

SO, imagine my delight when I discovered I could combine coffee AND creativity!  You might be surprised to know that I keep a little jar of instant espresso in my studio and usually I have a jar of it premixed with water at the ready.

Pro Tip: Putting a few drops of isopropyl alcohol in the premixed jar will help it not grow gross fuzzies (I’m speaking from experience!)

Sure, you can go buy inks and sprays that say they create the look of coffee or tea stained paper, but I’ve tried a few and they are just not the same!  If you want coffee or tea stained paper, just use coffee or tea, deal?

Read on to learn several ways to bring coffee into your creative practice.

Coffee & Creativity

Use it to make your own collage/art paper:

You can coffee stain all kinds of paper: printer paper, book pages, sheet music, watercolor paper, mixed media paper, envelopes, etc. Try out anything you can think of!

Mix up a strong batch of instant coffee, enough to fill a cookie sheet (the kind with the raised edges) or a 9 x 13 pan.  It doesn’t matter if you use cold or hot water.  Now, take a big whiff, yummmmmmmm.  This will bring you to your happy place.

Next, dunk your papers in the coffee and swish it around for a bit to make sure it gets soaked through.  You don’t have to leave it there for a long time, just a few minutes is good.  I discovered that leaving it in longer doesn’t change the color, a paper only soaks up so much and then it’s done.

Dry your coffee soaked paper by placing it on a grate of some sort to allow air flow under and over your paper, then place them in the oven at the lowest temp, out in the sun, or just set them out in your house and let them dry (this last way will take the longest but still works beautifully).

Now, one thing you can do when they are still very wet, is place a stencil on top of the paper and sprinkle a bit more coffee over the stencil and let it dry with the stencil on it.  This is the kind of effect you get:

Another thing you can do whilst your paper is still wet is sprinkle little bits of the dry instant coffee on your paper and let it soak in to make some areas much darker as you can see in some of  the images below.

Once your coffee stained papers are dry, the possibilities are endless.  BUT, my favorite thing is to use a stencil with some white acrylic paint  on the paper.  There’s something delicious about crisp white on old coffee stained paper.  I’ve also used a very light pink and it’s a bit more subtle than the white.  What color would you use?  Try out all your favorites!

You can also just use a white or black (or whatever color you’d like) paint pen or regular pen and scribble some writing across your page.  There is a type of writing you can do that is not readable, but looks like writing called ‘Asemic Writing‘ and I use that a lot in my art journaling etc.  Here’s a particularly grungy coffee page on which I did some Asemic Writing:

Using a bit of coffee to ‘paint’ the corners of a piece makes a great vintage feel.

Sprinkling little bits of instant coffee grounds right on your still wet page creates a cool effect (if you don’t add much water) or creates ‘stains’ if used with water just in specific spots on your page.

This next image shows both of these techniques plus stencils and some color:

Do a ‘wash’ of coffee over an entire art journal page or collage to tone down colors or to create a more vintage feel over the entire thing.  In this next piece, I painted coffee over the entire paper and then painted a flower on top.  The little darker marks to the left were a happy accident!

What do I do with all of these coffee stained papers?

Well, ANYTHING!  I made a card and a gift tag with some of mine for a friend’s baby shower and I ripped up a few and have used them in collages in my art journal.  The world is your oyster friends!

What other ways do you know, or have thought of already just from reading this?  I’d really love to hear your ideas!  I mean that!  We get collectively smarter when we share ideas.

Meanwhile, I wish I could have coffee with each and every one of you!  BUT, since that’s not possible, have a cup and create some cool creative stuff would ya?  I’ll be with you in spirit, doing the same right here in my studio (or kitchen!).

Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, Signing Off

playartwithkim.com

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