Art journal masterclass

After playing with plain coffee dyeing for a while, I found myself longing for more color, but without losing the raw, vintage textures that make coffee‑stained papers so magical. Boiling onion skins for that beautiful reddish tone was lovely—but not always practical. That’s when I thought: What if I just mix a tiny bit of acrylic into the coffee solution itself?And that opened the door to a whole world of earthy, muted, moody shades.

Tilt & Drip Dynamics
After spraying multiple hues, lift and tilt your paper so the wet paint runs. The flowing pigments blend organically, and varying pigment densities will naturally form speckles and cellular textures as they drip.

There are days when art flows like breath.
And then there are days when it’s stuck—heavy, bottled up, or simply uninspired.

That’s when I turn to scribbling. Not the tidy kind. Not the Pinterest-perfect kind. I mean raw, childlike, furious scribbles that release energy from my body, onto paper.

And today, I want to show you how I used that energy to create a stack of grungy, neutral, double-sided collage papers—perfect for tearing up, journaling on, or layering into your next mixed media piece.

Have you ever been captivated by the spontaneous flow of watercolor—the way colors melt into each other, unpredictable yet soothing? I have. I love the softness and meditation that watercolors bring.

But as someone who has painted with acrylics for over a decade, I’ve developed a special fondness for them. There’s something about acrylics—their versatility, texture, and vibrancy—that keeps drawing me back.

So I asked myself: What if I could play with acrylics in a way that feels like watercolor? That’s how this method was born—a playful, intuitive way to dye papers using diluted acrylic paint.

As I’m learning to create different mixed media collage papers, one thing I’m particularly enjoying is creating coffee dye papers.

I tried 3 types of dyeing – using coffee, tea and onion skins.

The coffee dye papers are a bit dark brown, tea dye is brownish and onion skin dye is reddish brown. I love all the 3 colors that they create on papers.

I wanted to experiment with acrylics and got some amazing results. It works with all the 3 types of dye, but I find coffee dyeing the easiest process of all – it’s as if I’m making myself a cup of coffee. So I added a little bit of green and blue with the coffee and tea mix and got some brilliant results.