Drawing With Coffee and Other Consumables
If you are familiar with Instagram culture, chances are you have stumbled upon drawings made of food or other objects, consumable or not. @yaseen_uk did it with wine, biscuit crumbs, milk, music tape, and many more.
The "wow factor" that comes from drawing with these unusual mediums is the fact that they are, well, unusual mediums. Milk is so not artsy and suddenly, it is. Suddenly you're looking at the world around you and thinking, what can I make from that?
So today, we drew with coffee.
I'm using regular coffee here, the cheap kind you can get in minimarkets. We had to create replicas of old photos. Think the 1940s-1950s. The lecturer asked as why, and I think it's because of two reasons: 1) old photos tend to be black and white, so it's easier to see the contrasts in value---which areas should you shade (or fill in with ingredients) and which ones should you leave alone (white space). When it comes to using only one ingredient, or one colour, whether it be ground coffee or charcoal or anything monochromatic, you're going for contrast. Positive and negative space. And it's easier to process that when the source already shows contrast (i.e. black and white). And 2) looking at it from a cultural perspective, there's something really old-timey about drawing with ground coffee. To me, coffee has always been a "grown-up drink", which doesn't make sense since the young-to-old ratio in Starbucks is like, 2:1, but there's something really old and vintage about it. Also, the dark brown particles may or may not look sepia-ish.
My first drawing is of Fatmawati, who sew the first Indonesian flag. A close up:
The coffee is quite finely milled, which I'm happy about. Also, I created this portrait on a piece of polyfoam. The application is a lot smoother than doing it on paper, where the particles get stuck and stain the surface. There's no glue involved or anything, so don't do this when you've got a cold and spewing mucus. That shizz gets everywhere.
Question of the day: can coffee particles trigger asthma?
Here's an original image of Fatmawati:
The second one is Pangeran Diponegoro, another national hero. We had to create a second drawing using unusual objects, and here is what I made:
It was greasy! Basically, I boiled plain noodles and mixed them with soy sauce (to give them colour) and cooking oil (so they don't get sticky). The result is a disgusting mess of slick and slippery noodles, stinky enough to drive cats away. It was so gross. And the noodles were hard to manipulate too. At first I wanted to use noodles because I thought they were iconic Indonesian dishes. I mean, everyone thinks noodles are Chinese or Japanese, but The Ramen Rater put Indomie as the best instant noodle he's ever tasted, so obviously we blow both of those countries out of the water when it comes to MSG and carbs.
I had a timelapse video showing the process of creating the noodle drawing, but I lost it, so I guess that's it for now.