I confess. I've been playing with my food. It occurred to me that I could do more than draw food for my food-themed mail art series. I could use the food itself for drawing. So instead of sumi, I experimented using coffee for ink. Ordinary-strength coffee wasn't dark enough, so I dissolved some long-expired coffee granules with a bit of water to get the desired density. After using this "ink" to make the outlines of various images, I watered it down to use as I would gansai paint, for coloring inside the lines. What resulted were etegami with the feel of sepia photographs. Kind of retro. I drew the coffee bean etegami with a bamboo quill-pen on a brown-tinged card (hence the blotches). The character in the upper right corner is the character for bean. I drew the old-fashioned coffee grinder with an ink brush on a white card and used the diluted coffee to color within the lines. I obviously need more practice, but I feel like I'm on to something. And the room sure smells good. ;D
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