I have painted in traditional Watercolors all of my life, being exposed to art around age 6 while watching my Grandma Mangus hand paint each Christmas card she would send that year.
In the spring of 2007, my Father-in-law came to stay with us in Florida. Audra Byrd Rogers was an incredible man who in 2017, at two months shy of 101 years old, went home to be with his lord. He had lived through "the Great Depression", worked in the CCC's and even ran a moonshine still in the heart of Kentucky. Now, one of Dad Rogers' particular chosen duties was to make the family coffee in the morning (he was usually up way before us and welcomed the opportunity to do something to help around the house). We showed him how to use our drip coffee maker, and all was well. But after a few weeks I noticed that Monday morning coffee, well, just didn't taste quite the same. My wife Jo, also agreed that something was definitely 'off' on Mondays. Therefore, after a few weeks of weird tasting Monday morning coffee my wife and I decided to ask Dad if he was doing something different on those days. He said "Oh, you noticed..." We waited, holding our breath, as he went on to say "he makes the fresh full pot on Sunday, and we go to church, visit with friends, run errands and when he goes to make coffee on Monday there is still almost a full pot. Not wanting to waste it, he simply pours the brewed coffee into the water reservoir and turns the coffee maker on"... Gasp...
I don't consider myself a coffee connoisseur (or a snob), but I do like fresh coffee, so I asked him, “If I could come up with a way to utilize the leftover coffee (so that it wouldn't be wasted) would he agree to not run it back through the coffee maker”.
Later that same day my wife and I were having lunch at Café D' Antonio in downtown Celebration, Florida. I was enjoying a coffee with my caprese salad. Suddenly, as my wife describes it, I got that dazed, deer in the headlights look and blurted out "I bet I can paint with it!". My wife, quite puzzled, said "Paint? With what?" "With the leftover coffee..." I replied.
Through the years I have painted in traditional watercolors, often times with a cup of coffee off to the side. There were times when a careless move would jostle, or worse, spill the cup and the liquid coffee would stain the paper. So, while we ate our lunch I postulated that if I could make something similar to a sauce reduction, like I had done in the restaurant business many years before, that maybe I could get the darker tones that I knew I needed to produce a painting with tonal range.
After lunch we returned home and I took the remaining coffee that was in the pot in the kitchen and poured it into a sauce pan, placed it on the stove and reduced it. I then took the pan into my studio, grabbed a scrap piece of watercolor paper and brushed the thick, dark coffee reduction over the surface and tried to work it with my brushes and palette knife, mixing it with some regular coffee. It reacted as I hoped, wet-in-wet, scratch-in and layering all responded very much the same as my professional traditional watercolors.
From that point on Dad Rogers would place any amount of leftover coffee in a pan I kept on the stove and I would use it to make paint, and he always brewed fresh coffee.
For the darker washes I start with a high quality Dark Roast Coffee such as: THR!VE Farmers®, Barnie's Coffee Kitchen®, Dunkin Donuts®, Jayells Coffee Company, Peet's Coffee®, Seattle's Best® (#5) or Starbucks®.
On low heat I simmer the liquid coffee slowly evaporating the water and thickening the brewed coffee.
After a few hours the coffee has reduced to a "resin"; a thick syrup consistency.
As the coffee syrup dries it becomes a hardened 'Coffee Resin' ready for me to use in producing my Dark Roast Watercolors™.
Check out this page concerning the stability of the Dark Roast Watercolors Paint:
