 Hello there! I'm Sandy Alnach with a crazy art video. I'm going to be painting with coffee and tea today. I've seen people paint with coffee before, and I thought it would be an interesting thing to try. So I went to the McDonald's and picked up some coffee there. I went to Starbucks, and I got a double espresso, double shot, and I got some tea. I made some tea in a cup with some Earl Grey and let it steep for quite a bit of time. And I also let all three of them cool way down because I didn't want to paint with something hot. I didn't know what that would do to my brushes, so I made sure I let them completely cool off. I got out a straw because I was just thinking about my good brushes and do I want to do anything with them or not. I thought, oh, I could grab a straw and drop some color in. So leaving my finger off of the straw, inserting it into the cup and then putting my finger over the top so that it would kind of suck up all that moisture, and then drop it onto the paper. And you can drop it from a high height if you want to get a real splatter that looks like a, you know, super coffee drop kind of splatter. If you're doing that on a card or something, that would be fun. I've seen people do all kinds of stuff with this, like spill some coffee or tea onto a piece of paper and then see what they can make out of that. Here I was deliberately trying to make some flowers, just a tall garden. That was just a little vision I had in my head, but you could do all kinds of crazy things too. You can see that the McDonald's coffee being just straight up coffee was kind of a medium brown. The espresso adds the darkness and the tea is very light. So you can experiment with all different kinds of liquids and different amounts of, you know, you could let it sit there for a long time and let moisture soak out of it to make darker coffee or darker tea. You could use different kinds of herbal teas that will give you different colors to paint with. Just, you know, lots of fun you can have with leftover stuff to paint that you're not drinking that you could just paint with to just make some art out of them. Just make sure that you wash your brushes really good. I did decide to be bold and stick my brush into the espresso, maybe not the wisest move, but I made sure I rinsed it really, really well afterward. And on something like this, I actually wash it with some soap and not just with water just to make sure, because I don't want to ruin a really good brush. So using one of my needle nose, needle nose, little tiny brushes has a really long point on the end of it and dropping in some lines for some of my stems of the flowers. And next up, I'm going to add some more of the espresso because I wanted some more darkness. Everything seemed to be getting mushy and puddley and lighter. So I threw in some darker color and depending on what brand and what kind and how long it was steeped and all kinds of things, you can get all sorts of different amounts of brown in them. I also had some instant coffee. I had gotten this a long time ago when my mom came to visit. My mom drinks coffee and I don't, but she likes instant. So that was in my cupboard from like 10 years back or something, I think. It's been around forever. And I thought, oh, I could use some for this. I could add both depth and texture. And I wasn't sure what this was going to do. Was it going to melt into the liquid that's already there? And it did to a good extent. It mixed in quite nicely and added a little bit of granulation to it. And I took my brush and added some more stems and a couple more flowers and things just to have fun and play around with it. Now one of the things I realized is that all of this is incredibly soppy, soppy wet. So debating whether or not to dab off some of those pools of coffee or if I wanted to just try to heat dry it all. So I took my heat gun and started trying and man, this stuff took forever. However, the thing that I think was cool is that it darkened everything. And if you think about roasting coffee, they do that with heat, don't they? I don't know much about coffee. I don't drink coffee, but when they roast coffee, I'm assuming roasting means heating. And heating is going to make it richer and darker. So the colors were getting darker as I was heating them up. And as I go through the other layers and reheating stuff, it just gets darker. I ended up with this really rich dark painting. But I wanted more of the texture. I was losing the texture because all that moisture was melting out all the coffee grounds. So I left it a little bit damp and I was going to see if I could put more coffee grounds on it while it was damp. Would they melt in or did it need to be puddley for it to melt out? And what I ended up doing was sprinkling the grounds on there while it was damp and that held some of them in place. But some of them of course went wherever because I'm not really careful in how I sprinkle things. So I did have to add some water to it. I did a little spritzing with water after I was done. But you could do this kind of a thing for a card if you're a card maker. You could do all kinds of beautiful things. You actually can paint a stamped image with it. You know, get a stamp of some coffee or something and make a coffee themed one that way. It smelled really good in the studio while I was painting this. I love the smell of coffee. I just don't like the taste of it so I don't drink it. And here I am spraying away at all of the little grounds and letting them just kind of start to melt into the painting a little bit. When it was all finished, it ended up with crusty grounds on the top. So if you want to actually preserve this painting, it's not going to be archival or anything. Mine ended up lumpy on the top and I didn't brush it all off because I kind of liked all that texture. I don't know what I'm going to do with this. But it was fun to do. It was just something fun and crazy to paint with. So maybe this will inspire you to think about the things you have in your house that you might paint with. So if you do that, please be sure to post it and tag me. I'd love to see what you're making. Thank you so much for visiting. I will talk to you later. Bye.