Whenever I’ve frequented Stockholm, one of my favourite places to visit has been the coffee shop ’Drop Coffee’ located close to Mariatorget, Södermalm. They’ve got absolutely fantastic coffee and the atmosphere is so wonderful, and when I was there this summer, I decided I wanted to make some kind of art project surrounding the cafe. Months later, and I’m finally done with the piece 🙂
THE PLACE ITSELF
When I visited the coffee shop in July and decided that I wanted to create a piece surrounding it, the first step was to take lots of reference pictures of the space. I tried to capture all spaces inside and outside the café, in order to make it easy for myself in the future.
I sat down in the café, as I wanted to do some sketching on location — this meant deciding the color palette off the bat. The colours that stuck out to me was the bright teal, the rusty red / pink, the dark blue and a lot of browns. When starting the sketching process, I enjoy getting down my initial impressions and so, the focus was on sketching what I saw inside the cafe and capturing the atmosphere I wanted to deliver with the piece.
VISUAL EXPLORATION
After I had gotten home, I sat down and completed my studies of the cafe itself. The next step was to try to figure out what kind of piece I wanted to do around the café — for me, that means a lot of visual research, which usually means creating a Pinterest board and gathering a lot of references. Then, in my sketchbook, I’ll do a lot of fast sketches based on references I like to build my visual library and understanding of the piece I want to create. I learn a lot from sketching.
Outside of this, I also went on their website and social media to see what they do with their brand, what their story is, and what’s important for Drop Coffee — this can determine a lot for the direction I want to take the piece, as the focus is on trying to portray their atmosphere and story thru my art. From my understanding, Drop Coffee is a brand that values sustainability and working closely with their coffee producers — they do roast their own coffee and sell it too — and there would have been potential in a project focusing on where the coffee comes from and it’s journey to you. However, my focus with this project was on the location of the cafe itself — and so, I decided to focus on the space itself and illustrating the experience I had when I was there.
ESTABLISHING CONCEPT
At this point, the premise of the piece was on Drop Coffee, the café. Then the question was how did I want to present it?
The basic idea was as follows:
- Create a ’main’ modular illustration showcasing the different areas + spaces of the cafe.
- Each of these illustrations should be able to be ’separated’ and used independently if this piece was expanded upon.
- Primary purpose I imagine is for digital marketing and navigation, but also would work well in a brochure or similar. One big display illustration to get your attention, smaller illustrations that can be used in combination.
After having established the basic idea, I wrote down all spaces of the cafe itself:
- Outdoors + entrance of the cafe.
- Entrance Door.
- Outdoors Seating.
- The Coffee Bar room.
- Seating by the wall.
- The coffee bar itself.
- The room left off the coffee bar room — seating + window.
- Seating towards the window.
- Small table where you can sit + hang.
- The room behind the coffee bar.
- Computer table
- Cute seating + small tables
- Bathroom
From this, I paired these into the ’small’ modules and sketched them out.
CREATION
After having sketched them out, it was simply arranging the sketches like a puzzle and getting them to fit in a neat composition.
First step was to turn the composition into a clean sketch, making sure to look at references to get it accurate but also taking liberty to make it work as a simplified illustration. When creating a stylized interpretation of a real place, it’s important to take out the pieces that make the place distinctive but also understanding how to modify it to work for your purposes.
When I had my clean sketch which meant it was time to start on the final illustration. I used the same colour palette as I had done for the traditional sketches, and started to draw module by module — this is something I did slowly over a couple of months, although the piece itself took around 20 hours to complete, excluding sketches.
THE FINAL PIECE
And finally — here’s the final piece! For this project, I decided to limit myself to the primary poster illustration as separating and detailing each module would have been a hefty task to take on. However, the piece is structured in a way, so if I wanted to take this project further, I could have made a detailed version of each module as well as adding more information to them such as what you can order, and more insight into the coffee itself.
With that, that is the first proper process post on this journal, so thank you for reading — and hope you took something away from this!
Links:
Instagram Post:
Drop Coffee: https://www.dropcoffee.com/
Pinterest Board: https://pinterest.com/moodymagpies/2025-pinterest-boards-for-my-projects/drop-coffee/