Easy Coffee Painting for the Absolute Beginner

Coffee Painting for Beginners

Making a coffee painting is most similar to using watercolor paints. The biggest difference is that you can only do a monochromatic (one color) painting. But what you end up with is a coffee painting with some really nice sepia tones, which is a great look.

Any subject matter will work for your coffee paintings. But today we’ll do some landscape paintings because it’s an easy way to get familiar with using coffee as paint.

Finding Art Inspiration

Whenever starting a new creative adventure, it’s important to find inspiration. These days there are no shortages of inspiration around us. Often, these are more like distractions.

One of the places I go for art inspiration is Instagram. There are tons of amazing artists on there. And of course the feed is constantly changing, so you can see new works of art all the time.

Another great place for inspiration, or ideas to paint or draw, are sites with reference photos. Unsplash has a lot of great photos to use as reference.

What Coffee to Use for Coffee Painting

The easiest thing to use is instant coffee, that is diluted to different degrees with water. It’s also the quickest way to get your coffee ready for painting. You can darken up areas of your painting by adding more layers, but it’s easier and quicker if you mix up some different tones with your coffee.

Doing this will take some experimenting, but it’s fun trying different things. And if you enjoy the smell of coffee, you’ll really have fun.

You can also use brewed coffee or espresso, which is more concentrated. But I found using instant coffee to be the more convenient approach.

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What Type of Paper to Use When Painting with Coffee

Since coffee painting is very similar to watercolor painting you’ll want to use a nice paper for your artwork. Watercolor paper is the best thing to use, but you can get away with using cardstock if you don’t want to spend the extra money on some good paper.

For the examples in this tutorial, I used cardstock that was cut into artist trading card (ATC) size pieces. I do the majority of my artwork on ATCs because they are a huge time saver. And they are easy to store in binders that can also serve as portfolio.

How to Mix Coffee for Painting

You’ll probably want to experiment with mixing up your coffee paint. The different tones are made by varying the amount of coffee to water. You can start with a 50/50 mix and see what that looks like on your paper. When making your coffee paintings, you’ll want to mix up two or three different tones of paint.

Keep in mind that you can easily make it lighter by adding more water while you’re working on your painting. Therefore, you’ll want to mix up mostly darker and mid range tones. Also keep in mind that you can add layers to your coffee painting to darken up some of the areas.

Your colors will be less vibrant on lower quality paper than if you’re using higher quality watercolor paper. So if you’re making paint swatches be sure to use the same paper you’ll be painting on.

This exercise shouldn’t take you much time and it will help you figure out how to mix your water and coffee.

How to Paint with Coffee

If you’ve used watercolors before this technique will be really easy for you. The only difference is that you’re only using one color, so it’s just like doing a monochromatic watercolor painting. Just like watercolor painting, you can use a wet on wet, layering, dry brush, or anything else you want to use.

You can lift the paint up with a dry brush or paper towel to lighten an area, just like you would with watercolors. It’s an extremely similar process which makes it perfect for all skill levels of artists.

Step by Step Coffee Painting of a Galaxy

As mentioned earlier, these were done on artist trading cards so I could trade them with other artists after my paintings were completed. You can learn more about ATCs by going to How to Make Artist Trading Cards (ATCs).

Begin by covering your paper with a thin layer of clean water. A number 10 round brush works really well for these paintings.

Next, use the light tone coffee paint to add some areas of color to your paper. Vary the tone by adding more coffee to different areas.

Continue by adding in the darker coffee that was mixed with less water. Keep working while your painting is still wet. Add in darker areas on your painting. Allow the coffee to flow together.

Next, add in the darkest tone towards the top of the painting and along the edges. Don’t be afraid to play around with the different coffee mixtures.

If an area is too dark, you can lift it up with either a dry paintbrush or a paper towel.

Painting Trees and Stars

Allow the coffee to dry before adding in the trees. I used the darkest coffee paint for mine. You could also use a marker for this step. If you want to speed up the drying time you could use a heat gun or a hair dryer.

Finish your painting by adding in some stars. This can be done with a white Gelly Roll pen, like I did for this ATC. Or, you could use gouache and splatter your stars.

As you can see, this next painting is much darker than the previous one. I was surprised by how much of a difference the paper made in how the coffee paint looked when dry.

I used Arches 140 lb watercolor paper. A Pitt artist pen was used to add in the trees. Gouache was used to splatter in the stars for this painting.

I chose to do some galaxy paintings with the coffee, but you really could paint anything you want. Every work of art could be done using a monochromatic color scheme.

The Big Takeaways

So here are the big takeaways for the day.

Coffee works really well to do a monochromatic painting
Your house will smell really good
It’s easy to work with
Instant coffee is cheap and lasts a long time

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