Espresso

I tend to think of espresso as simply being proper coffee – with nothing added to disguise, mute or dilute the taste of the beans. This brand in particular I also associate with being abroad, mainly because I have often been served it on the continent. In fact this make of coffee is also available in Blighty, so the fact that it feels satisfyingly foreign to me (rather like the sight of trams that I mentioned previously) is probably just a reflection of the types of places I drink coffee when I’m at home or travelling! For the record, the coffee that served as a model for this picture was drunk in Stuttgart, and was as always very nice.

As with my previous picture of a latte (an occasional concession to the need for my drink in a cafe to last more than a few seconds if I am meeting someone there) I decided to minimise the colour palette here to create a stylised image using vector graphics. I added the “out of focus” background on a whim to see if it made the whole look more like a fancy photograph – to me the effect works so I kept it. Of course, that is one of the advantages of drawing on an iPad – one can keep adding and removing bits of the picture until either the image is perfect – or until time, energy &/or patience are exhausted! Feel free to decide for yourself the real reason why I stopped work on this image …