When I was a skateboarder, I could never manage to pull off a flip trick. You have to kick your feet a certain way, to get the board to spin upside-down, and then land back on top of it, and it on the ground, and keep rolling. I never managed to get my brain to convince my body of what it needed to do, although my brain entirely understood “how” to do it.

Latte art, for me, is like this. My brain processes the pours I’ve already done, and I make the necessary adjustments in my head. But getting those adjustments to work themselves out in my muscles is something else entirely. As soon as I manage to fix one part of my method, another part goes awry, and getting the total package is just tough.

I’ve particularly been struggling to get the big, round, “border leaves” on my rosettas, which are otherwise looking pretty good. Today I realized what I’d been doing wrong, and worked to make the adjustments. What I ended up with are some majorly rounded rosettas, which lack a little of the definition of my previous ones. But I’m still excited about them, because my hands are getting the hang of the motion needed to get that rounding effect. Now, I just have to make it all come together. At this rate, I’m hoping it won’t be too long.

Starting to get the rounding effect here. I like the “yin and yang” effect, and hope I can figure out how to reproduce it someday.

Nice definition in this one, and pretty nice rounding on the right side. Of course, it’s pretty unbalanced and quite “sharp,” but still kinda cool.

I was going for round, and I got it here. I think this is really neat, although the definition is a little lacking. That I managed to fill the whole cup with some sort of “art” is quite a leap from where I’ve been previously.

Tags: latte art, rosetta

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 2.46 pm and is filed under coffee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.