I’m not a coffee drinker. I don’t keep it in the house and even though I wanted to use it in my art, I could never bring myself to just buy a bag of it. So, I brought some freshly used grounds home from the office I work in during the day, and set to work experimenting with encaustic and coffee grounds.
I essentially worked with the grounds in 2 ways- with the full grounds themselves, and then with the liquid. I added the wet grounds to the surface of the wax in the places I wanted to pigment and let them dry overnight. Then, I either left all the gravelly pieces where they were, or blew the excess away.
For the piece above, I kept the grounds on the surface and once they were dry, I dripped more wax over the top of them and fused them to the layers below, encasing the grounds in wax.
For this piece, I wanted to try using coffee pigments to fill incised lines. It sort of worked- it was a bit harder to scrape the lines clean after using the liquid pigment, as you can see. Next time I’ll use more layers of wax and make the lines deeper and see if that helps.
Coffee has such a dark, rich color that perfectly compliments the natural look of wood and encaustic medium. Working with encaustic and coffee grounds is definitely fun and fills my studio with such a great scent. I’ll probably end up buying some bags of it after all!
What do you think? Have you ever worked with encaustic and coffee grounds before?
I’ve used coffee grounds and liked the results. Have used them dry rather than wet. I used the wet grounds and liquid to stain awagami paper and cheesecloth for which it works nicely. Thanks for sharing!
I mix wax colours with acrylic in landscapes,all experiment ,but FUN!