Coffee Drop Mosaics

November 16, 2020

This project evolved considerably over the years. It’s origins date back to late 2011. While planning for the upcoming 2012 Twin Peaks Fest, my friend Amanda and I were brainstorming things we could do to really make the final fest that we would run something special. One of the ideas I proposed was to break a world record for largest coffee mosaic. Nothing is more Twin Peaks than coffee (and cherry pie). At the time, the Guinness World Record was held by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority for their 3,604-cup portrait of the Mona Lisa that took a team of eight people three hours to complete.

Could we beat that? I mocked up a 100x70, six-color, sepia mockup image of the Double R Diner sign with the Twin Peaks mountain in the background. I think it was doable, but time got in the way, and we didn’t pursue it much more than my mockup image. Funny enough, just a week after the festival that year, a 62-cup by 91-cup image of Elvis became the new world record. If we had done my 100x70 mockup, we would have had the record and the Elvis attempt wouldn’t have had enough cups!

A few years went by, and I was playing around with a way to programmatically create a detailed holiday sweater design. I wanted it to look as real as possible, to actually see the yarn, compared to many other holiday sweater designs where it’s just square pixels enlarged and printed on a sweatshirt. I wanted the creation to be made from a simple, low-color, pixel-based image, which it would then output a large, yarn-based image. It took quite a bit of programming, but I did finally get the project to work, just in time for Christmas.

A few more years went by and I happened upon a fun art exhibit where a tiny computer was fed a digital image, and an XY plotter physical printed the image using coffee drops of varying sizes. My knowledge of programming physical machines is non-existent, but I knew I already had the holiday sweater program, so I definitely could modify that to use scanned in images of coffee drops of varying sizes.

The first piece I created with the new program was that very same image of the Double R Diner from all those years ago. Nine years later, and that world record mockup was finally put to great use! As another tribute to Twin Peaks, the second piece I created was of David Lynch.

World Records for Coffee Mosaic Art

Note: Some are not Guinness certified, which is why the 2019 King Tut record contains fewer cups than previous years; the previous years weren't certified.