Whirling dervish with coffee

I have been meaning to paint a whirling dervish for a while (my wife is a big Rumi fan) so I thought I would start with a simple study in Coffee...yeah right, anything but simple. It all started when my coffee maker decided not to work, and I figured I could make coffee on the stove. Well I quickly managed to burn a pot of coffee. I have tried painting with coffee before (Leopard with Coffee) and realized that normal coffee won't do, it has to be a very thick consistancy, and well, I was almost there with my burnt coffee...definitely not drinkable at this point.

Once I had my "paint" made then it was just a matter of finding the right values to capture shadows and highlights. Other than my pencil lines in my sketch outline, this is completely painted with coffee.

Leopard with coffee

In anticipation of entering a piece of work in the Rancho Cordova City Hall mixed media exibit, I decided to try something new. Of course since the deadline was today at 6:00 pm, I started it this morning...I'm such a procrastinator! Earlier this week I was painting and accidentally rinsed my brush in my coffee cup. It got me thinking, maybe I could paint with coffee.
After I did a simple pencil sketch from a photo of a leopard, I drew in the black spots and lines with a black oil pastel. I also put in white whiskers with oil pastel...they didn't resists the water as well as I had hoped. Then I took some old coffee ( that usually goes to water the plants) and used it as a wash over my pencil sketch. This is the lightest wash on the nose. I needed to get it darker so I boiled the coffee to get it more concentrated. As I continued to test for darkness, and then boil some more, it slowly got to almost where I wanted the color. It definitely is more difficult to work with coffee than watercolor. The darker spots in the shadows needed some black watercolor mixed in.  All of the other color in the painting is watercolor. Sorry the picture didn't come out very well. I try to take photos before I put them under glass, but I was on a deadline!