Coffee will stain. This was not an issue. Was it quite permanent? Ezju had enough white business button downs embarrassed just before important meetings to know the staining power of coffee. It took several washings with bleach to remove a coffee stain and sometimes it still wouldn’t come completely out. What Ezju found with his first coffee sketch was the tonal range was limited even with glazing

Being a curious lad, Ezju experimented to create a coffee medium that would satisfy his artistic need for a wide tonal range. Several recipes were tried from adding coffee to acrylic medium to brewing coffee in linseed oil. These experiments yielded some limited success. An old school exercise produced a very simple yet effective medium. The experiment had students boil down salt water to find concentrated salt left on the bottom of the pan. Using large amounts of brewed coffee Ezju condensed 20 pots of coffee down to 6oz – 8oz of natural oils and very dark and dense suspension.

You can purchase a bottle of Ezju’s coffee paint in the No Such Animal Studio store.

Ezju has developed a couple different coffee painting techniques. The first is applying the coffee paint much like a watercolor depending on full saturation for the darks and thinning the paint out with water for the lighter tonal values.

Some times Ezju adds a bit of pigment for more colorful image. This can be done by using watercolor as an under-painting or pigment can be added to the water used to thin out the coffee paint.

One thing to keep in mind is coffee paint is naturally sticky. As the paint is laid down by brush it will tend to have cohesion which can make detail work vexing. Ezju found that diluting the paint or leading it if full dark tone is needed. Glazing will now work with the concentrated paint also.

The second technique is layering coffee paint, applied by brush or hand, between encaustic (wax medium) applications and building up layers. This creates several very different textures and looks.

An important thing to keep in mind about encaustic is when you mix pigment with the encaustic medium a solution is produced. Pigment is inert, ground stone and minerals. A solution means the pigment becomes part of the medium and will not fall out or settle. Coffee is in an organic. An organic mixed with encaustic medium will only create a suspension.

Working with an encaustic suspension has its difficulties but can produce some very fun and effective results. Experimentation with this limitation will bring out an astonishingly wide range of aesthetics.