THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO LATTE ART w/ 2x Latte Art World Champion Lance Hedrick

What's up everybody, Lance here. I've won a couple of the world latte art championships and have done really well in a lot of throw downs around the country and around the world. And on top of that, I've trained people from America and outside of America through Instagram DMs and in person. So I've done a lot of stuff with latte art and I've had a lot of requests ever since that milk steaming video to do a latte art tutorial. Well, good news, I was planning on doing it anyway and we're doing it right now. So before we begin, it's important that you all have incredible milk texture in order to really go forth with latte art. Now, in order to get that proper milk texture, I'm gonna link right here, my video for milk steaming. Now, I want you to be able to steam the milk incredibly silky, and I want it to pass the shake test before you really try to do this because a lot of people are gonna try these things I'm about to show you. They're not gonna get it the first time. They're gonna give this video a dislike and get really upset, but I can tell you what, if you have proper milk texture and you go through this video a few times, I promise you, you'll be able to do some incredible things, especially with a lot of practice. Just remember that baristas don't get latte art their first day, so likelihood is you won't either. To understand latte art, you need to understand three basic things, and we're gonna go over these, and I'm gonna do something that's famous on TikTok. I'm gonna go, first thing is spout proximity. Second thing is, I feel like a loser doing this, the cup rotation, and the last thing is flow rate. These are the three phrases that we're gonna get embedded in our heads and understand properly before we're able to go forward and really attempt any type of latte art. So what are these three things, you ask? Well, they're all kind of self-explanatory. Spout proximity refers to the pitcher spout and how close it is to the level of the liquid in your cup at any given moment. So if you have liquid down here, like at the very bottom, if you have two ounces of espresso in your cup, so visualize, maybe we'll put a little graphic of dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. We've got level of espresso here, and we have our pitcher here, which is full of milk, and I actually have it full of milk, so I can't, so literally right here is as far as I can go before milk drops. Visualize the amount of space there is between the spout and the surface of the espresso. There's a solid two to two and a half inches, or for people outside the customary system, maybe four and a half, five centimeters. That is quite a bit of distance, so the spout proximity is quite high. Now, with that same two, the little dots right there, if I were to tilt the cup, and I'm gonna keep my finger here for that espresso, if I tilt the cup, because obviously liquid's always gonna be parallel to the ground, all right, because of gravity, hello, what we're gonna do is if I tilt the cup, look, we're gonna get that espresso right to the lip, and it's still gonna be level to the ground, because that's how liquid works. Now watch how close my spout is. The milk is about to come out, but look at that. I am maybe a centimeter from the surface of that liquid, so spout proximity refers to the distance between the spout and the liquid in your cup, whether it's just the espresso or when we add milk. Every time I refer to spout proximity, I'm referring to the distance between the spout and the liquid. Spout proximity, distance between spout and liquid. That's number one. Number two, cup rotation. Now, when you asked about cup rotation, I remember the first time I heard this was from someone who was an Australian latte art champ named Ben Morrow. He referred to it, and I genuinely thought, and I kept trying to see it in his videos, he meant rotating like this. That's not what I'm talking about when I say cup rotation. I mean this. This is cup rotation, and it's integral to proper latte art. Cup rotation is going to help you spread your design. So think about the dynamics of flowing liquid, right? If I'm flowing liquid and I rotate it, it's gonna absorb that liquid, right? But if I keep it stagnant, first off, it's probably gonna spill. But if it doesn't spill, if we have a little bit of room left over, that shape is gonna get stuck because we're not absorbing it. We're not adding some velocity to it, some momentum to really accept the shape into the cup. So the second thing we're talking about is cup rotation. This is what's gonna really help you get, when you see the designs that have a lot of nice brown lines in it, and it has a lot of spacing between layers, it's because as you're pouring, you're emphasizing that rotation. Now, you might ask yourself or ask me, Lance, why is your cup ever tilted like this? You're gonna spill. Well, if you recall, spout proximity, we have to tilt the cup to get that spout as close as possible, which I'll get to here in a second. Now, the last thing that we're gonna talk about is flow rate. Now, flow rate is what it sounds like. Now, all this stuff is very intuitive. I'm not gonna make anything difficult for you. There's not magic going on in the cup. It's basic physics, okay? Flow rate is literally the speed at which the milk is coming out of the pitcher. So a low flow rate would be a milk kind of trickling out of the pitcher. So it'd be something like this, low flow rate. Now, you see how it's going almost up and down? And the faster I pour, the more of an angle it comes out, right? So the faster I pour, the faster the flow rate. The slower I pour, the slower the flow rate. And actually, I'm kind of parched. I'm gonna, I'll love some milk. Okay, so flow rate is referring to the speed at which milk is exiting the pitcher. So we have those three things that we really need to get inside our minds as we're going forward. It will really help you shape and understand and formulate schema in order to understand what's happening with latte art. Now, I want to explain what latte art is. Now, when I understood these three things as well as what latte art is, that's when my game really took the next step, took to the next level. Having these aha moments, I truly believe, are what help people escalate to the next level. So what is latte art? I like to talk about latte art in the same way that I talk about painting. So if you imagine a painter walking up to a canvas, they don't just start painting. The first thing that they do, because the canvas is not stretched out yet, it's just a piece of flappy canvas, they take the canvas and they stretch it over a wooden frame in order to make it taut. And on that taut surface is where they begin to paint, right? Same thing happens with latte art. In order to create your design, you have to lay a basis, what I refer to it. So the espresso in the cup is not dense enough to hold milk foam on top. All latte art is, real quick, all latte art is is you're taking milk, white milk foam, and you're painting on top of brown milk foam, all right? So how do we get brown milk foam? Well, you have espresso in here, it's not dense enough to hold white milk foam on top. So what we do is we're gonna just give a little bit of milk to the espresso. We're gonna integrate milk into the espresso with our silky milky, all right? Regardless of it being dairy or non-dairy, we're gonna give it some, we're just gonna give it a little bit, all right? And what's gonna happen is that is gonna create a brown foam if we pour it properly, all right? Now we have a brown foam, we have set the base, we have set the canvas like the artist has, and we, with our latte art, have set our canvas by pouring a little bit of milk. A good rule of thumb, in bowl-shaped cups like this, you see how this is shallow and quite wide? These are the best for latte art. Granted, you can do it in a diner mug, but it's gonna be a little bit more difficult because of those tall lips, but I digress. What we're gonna do is about 30%, we're gonna give the cup about 30% until it's 30% full. Not 30% of our milk until the cup's about 30% full, so about here, all right? So we start with two ounces of espresso, we give maybe an ounce and a half of milk in order to bolster it with milk foam. That milk foam is strong and is gonna be able to hold the white milk foam on top. So we're going to literally be painting white milk foam on top of brown espresso-infused milk foam, all right? That's what latte art is. We're gonna do the same thing a painter does. We're stretching our canvas. I call it laying a base. So when you hear me later in this video, or in future latte art videos, saying laying a base, lay your base more aggressively, lay it more softly, lay it in the center, I'm referring to that 30% amount where you're dumping out milk into your cup to create that brown foam, which is the base of our design. It is our canvas. The espresso is like the flappy canvas that you can't really paint on. The laying of the base is like stretching the canvas on the wooden frame, all right? So we have that down. We have now set our frame when we're ready to paint. Now comes in spout proximity, all right? In order to get those first designs onto our canvas, we have to get that spout as close as possible, maybe even touching if you can get that close without feeling uncomfortable, as close as possible to the surface. Why is that? Well, let's imagine that painter again. He walks up and he's fixing to paint, and he decides, oh, here's my canvas, and I have my paintbrush. I'm gonna start painting here. Well, that's silly. Obviously, if he's not making contact with the brush onto the canvas, no paint is gonna come out. He's just painting the air. Same thing's gonna happen here due to gravity. If we're pouring from up here, that foam that we have created that is sitting on top of our more dense milk, that foam sitting there is gonna just sink. Gravity going at 9.8 meters per second squared is just gonna take its effect, and it's gonna go underneath our crema, our brown milk foam. It's gonna go underneath, right at the bottom of the cup, and stay underneath, and it's not gonna show any latte art. So the closer we can get, the better. So take that cup after you've poured your 30%, tilt it as much as you can where that brown foam is at the lip, and then we're gonna get our spout as close as possible like that. Look at that, boom, spout proximity. And I'm gonna keep breaking stuff down as we go. I just, this is my pedagogical technique. I like to give everything in bites and continue to expound on them as I go. So what we have done is we have set our canvas. We have laid that 30% of the cup with milk. So if you're at home and you tried that, we have the 30%. We tip the cup all the way. We get the spout as close as possible. So we've done our spout proximity. Then we go to cup rotation. So once you begin to pour, obviously you must rotate the cup or you'll spill everywhere. So you rotate. Rotation's gonna really help you set your design. So spout proximity is gonna start the design. The cup rotation sets the design in place. It also helps you with spacing, okay? And the last thing is the flow rate, okay? The faster you pour, and this is a really important thing to understand. People, I've seen people, they tag me in videos and they ask, why is my design not coming out after I lay my base? And I say, well, send me a video so I can really understand what's going on. And they're showing me in their video. Let me get some more milk in my pitcher. This may be a mess, but one, two, three, hey-o! Steady hands. And just kidding, I did make, no one cries over spilled milk. Okay, so we're gonna take this and I lost my train of thought. So let me get back to it in three, two, one, got it. So we're gonna be, we have the base right here and I see people lay in their base this slowly and then they try to pour and nothing's happening, all right? Or they'll have the back part, the back part and around the edges, there'll be a lot of thin looking milk shooting out and ruining any potential design. And people are like, well, what's going on? Well, the answer is simple and it deals with foam and foam disbursement. Now, when you steam your milk and you begin to pour, foam doesn't want to leave that nice cushy metal insides of the pitcher. It's stubborn. It's like, nah, fam, I don't wanna get out of this pitcher. I wanna stay here, all right? And so we have to encourage it. We have to coax it to get out, all right? So we're gonna pour faster and faster and faster as we keep pouring. The way I like to describe this is using concrete as an example. So remember I said at the beginning, this espresso is not viscous enough to hold a design. So we're gonna give it some milk in order to hold that design, right? Well, obviously they're implied in that is that giving foam here increases viscosity. So it would make sense that the more foam we put in, the more the viscosity has risen, right? So the more the viscosity raises, the more intense we have to pour in order to make any change. So listen, let's use concrete as an example. When I pour that beginning, setting the base, when I pour that base, what I've done is I've laid the concrete, all right? Laid the cement. Let's say cement, I said concrete. I've laid the cement, right? Now on day one of cement, if you wanna go and put your hands in it, right? Because you're like, oh, I'm funny. I'm gonna put my hands in or like Michael Scott putting his face in it. It's really goopy and it's not gonna hold the shape very well day one. And also if you've laid cement before or concrete before or whatever, I can't remember which I'm using cement. If you've laid cement before, you know this is not accurate as far as the days. I'm using these days for, like I said, pedagogical reasons. So on day one, let's assume this is day one. It's really soft. You put your handprints in it or you write your name and it's kind of goopy. It doesn't really wanna hold its shape. So you keep adding milk. You go to day two, it's perfect day two. You can sit there and write your name and it's gonna be just beautiful. It'll hold its shape for forever. It's gonna dry perfectly and there it is. Day three, as you keep adding milk, that viscosity is rising. Now that cement is quite hard. You can still write your name in it, but you're gonna have to get a stick or something. You're gonna, like that. There's some sound effects for you people who saw the beatboxing video. So we're gonna like have to go hard to scrape my name into it, right? And even still, they're gonna be like little pill balls of cement that come up because it's almost fully dry. So the idea is as you're adding more milk, you're gonna have to be more aggressive with how you're drawing, with how you're making your art. And then on day four, it's fully solidified. There's nothing more you can do. That's what happens if your milk is too thick and you're too far in the pour, or if you've poured it to the top and you're trying to add something and the foam is just like kind of sitting on top and blobbing, it's because guess what? That foam is too thick now. You've added all of the milk that you can. It's not wanting to change anymore. So think of as you're pouring milk and you may wanna rewind that and take notes because that's a really good analogy. As you're pouring milk, it's gonna continue to concretize. So it is concrete that I use. So I'm going back and forth between cement and concrete. I don't know the difference. I'm sorry. There may be no difference. Drop in the comments, you can make fun of me. So as you keep pouring, it's gonna continue to concretize. And so day one, it's gonna be mushy. It's not gonna really hold its form. So you wanna make sure you have enough milk in that espresso to hold its form. Day two, it's gonna continue to solidify, but it's at that perfect stage where you can start rippling if you want, but we're not into that yet. You can start your heart shape or whatever simple shape you're wanting. And it's gonna come out crisp and really quickly and you're gonna freak out. You're gonna go, oh my goodness, this is working so well, I don't know what to do. But don't freak out. Don't slow down your pour. Continue to speed up because as you keep adding milk, you're adding foam. As you're adding foam, it's becoming harder and harder to change the design. So you have to go faster and faster with your pour. Otherwise, it's gonna be a small shape. So concretization, very important. As you keep adding milk to your cup, it's gonna concretize as it goes up. It's gonna get thicker and thicker and it's gonna be harder and harder to make any difference. So as you're pouring, your flow rate needs to slowly increase in order to make any changes, okay? So those are our three staples. Our staples are what again? I'm gonna let you say them at home, like off Dora the Explorer, when they say swipe or no swipey, say them with me. That's right, spout proximity, cup rotation and flow rate. All right, good job. Everyone's doing so well. All right, so now we have an understanding of what latte art is and how it's affected by our flow rate and how it's affected by the foam that goes in there and the raising viscosity, all right? So what I wanna do now, and I know I'm using, I have milk in here, which is gonna be fine, but you can do this with water. I'm gonna do it with milk so it's easier to see on the screen. But the best way to understand feeling the flow rate is by getting some water in your cup and really feeling what it's like to pour fast flow rate, slow flow rate, fast flow rate. That is hard to say. Say that four times fast, five times fast. Fast flow rate, slow flow rate, fast flow rate, slow flow rate. So as you watch, I'm gonna do that with you and I'm gonna show you while I'm doing this when you need to speed your flow up. So let's act like this little bit of milk is my espresso. All right, so I have my two ounces of espresso in here, two ounces of espresso, all right? And now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to lay my base. So to lay your base, you don't wanna be really close. All right, so I'm gonna tell you some things you don't wanna be. You don't wanna be really close because what could happen is because that espresso is so thin, the foam could shoot down right up the back and sit on top. And then you have white sitting on top. It's ruined our contrast, all right? You don't wanna be too high because guess what? Same thing's gonna happen. It's gonna shoot down with all that velocity. It's gonna ride up the back because it's a nice curved cup. It's gonna sit on top, that foam is. And you don't wanna be too close to the side because guess what? That darn thing's gonna happen again. If it's too close to the edge, if I'm pouring here, like some people like to go side to side laying their base. If you get too close to the edge, it's gonna ride around the edge and it's gonna show up over here and it's gonna ruin our contrast. So the best way to do this is to tilt your cup to lay your base, tilt your cup just a bit. You don't have to go all the way to the lip, just a bit and aim for the center because guess what? See how deep it is right here? My espresso is that deep. If I tilt, look how much deeper it is with that angle here. I have a lot deeper of an angle if I go for the middle here than if I were to go for the middle here. So I want a little bit deeper so I don't have that issue of it rising up the back and ruining contrast by getting foam on top. So I'm gonna aim for the center and I start kind of low and I'm gonna go up maybe an inch and just kind of go side to side a bit, not all the way to the edges. If you go to the edges, I'm gonna reach through this camera and I'm gonna say, don't go through the edges because I'm not an aggressive person even though I might sound like it. So we're gonna get close and we're gonna go up a couple inches and we're just gonna go side to side to lay our base, all right? And once we're 30% full and if I spill again, I'm just gonna wipe it up like a pro. So we're gonna go 30% up and we're just gonna drop in right in the middle with it barely tilted and you're gonna rise up an inch or was it 2.2 centimeters, okay? You're just gonna, or 2.4, whatever it is, whatever the conversion is. About an inch, 2.4 centimeters, maybe three, four centimeters, maybe an inch and a half. We're gonna just rise up and the reason we rise up is think about it, gravity's gonna come in. So foam somehow, if some really stubborn foam decides to sit on top and try to ruin our brown foam for our setting the base, then by rising up, what we're gonna do and consider this, when that milk's going down and it has gravity added to it, it's gonna cause a sink hole. So you have your level of liquid. If I were to come down with liquid here, everywhere surrounding that entry point is gonna sink. It's all, like I said, Gloucester is very intuitive. It all makes sense. The ideas are not difficult. Yes, hand-eye coordination is difficult but I want you to understand mentally what is going on here, okay? So when you're pouring, it's gonna cause a sink hole surrounding wherever the pour is at. It's gonna cause a little sink hole. So if a little white comes in and you pour where the white foam is, it'll sink the white foam right back. Good to go, all right? Good as gold, right as rain. Whatever other phrase you wanna say right there, there it is. All right, so we have now laid our base. We have our espresso. We're gonna get somewhat close, drop, come up a couple inches or an inch, inch and a half, two inches, few centimeters and boom. Now we have our stretched canvas. Now what do we do? Oh my goodness, Lance, what are we gonna do? Now we're gonna make that, what people in coffee call a monk's head, which is essentially a heart without the pointy bottom. So to make a monk's head, we're going to just get our spout proximity as close as possible. And then we're gonna have the cup tilted as much as possible. We're gonna take our three things we've learned. We're gonna tilt our cup as much as possible to get that spout proximity as close as possible. And then we're gonna start pouring. We're gonna be gentle when we drop in. Drop in is our initial pour after setting the base. We're gonna drop in and we're gonna increase our flow rate rapidly. So you're gonna drop in and increase the flow, increase the flow rate, and then we're gonna be done once it's full, all right? And you'll see when you try it, you'll have a really nice white foam blob on top. All right, real quick, I wanna make something clear. With these designs we're doing, they're a single shape, all right? A single drop. Again, a drop is whenever you drop in after setting your base. So yes, at the beginning, we are making a drop when we set our base, but I refer to that as setting the base. Whenever we decide to make our design, every time we go in and stop, that's a drop. So our monk's head is a one-drop pour, all right? A heart, which is a monk's head with the tail through it, is a one-drop pour. If we were to have two separate hearts in the cup, that would be a two-drop pour. You're getting it? If we had three separate hearts, it'd be a three-drop pour. So when I say drop, I'm referring to after we set the base every time we drop in. Okay, if we're doing a one-drop pour, like the monk's head or like the heart, then wherever you drop in, wherever in the cup from front to back that you drop in is going to be the top of your shape. All right? Does that make sense? That will be the top of your design. Wherever you drop in is where the top of the design will be. So if I take this cup, so look, if I'm using the cup like so, actually, this one has still a little milk residue. If I'm using the cup like so, okay? So I would be pouring back here. I'm gonna turn so you can see like this, okay? So I'm holding it, I'm tilting it. If I drop back here, guess what? The top of the monk's head will be right there. If I drop down here, the top of the monk's head will be down there and it'll be weird because the monk's head will be in the bottom half of the cup, which is not symmetrical. It's not centered. It doesn't look very nice. We want it nice and centered in our cup. So in order to make a really nice big monk's head that's gonna take up the whole cup, we're gonna start near the back, about half an inch or about a centimeter into the cup. So right about here. You see that in the video? Boom. Maybe overhead. So I'm gonna lay my base overhead. Or actually here's my, that's my espresso. Lay the base. And then watch where I drop. My drop is right here. On a one drop shape, that is where the top of my design is going to be. Okay, so we've got that now. I'm not gonna go into multiple drops in this video. That'll be for a future one. But please, even if you think you're really great at latte art, and you may be, continue watching this because I promise you, this is going to help you with future pours. And I will be building off this in future videos. So this is a very important video to watch. Because I'll be using terminology and we'll be alluding to this video frequently for future latte art ones. If we're doing a one drop pour, there's my espresso. I lay the base, I get close. I come up a few centimeters, inch or two. Stop. I'm gonna, I want the top of my monk's head here. So I'm gonna start pouring here, but guess what? I'm gonna increase my flow rate greatly. And I'm not moving. I didn't move anywhere. I stayed right there and I maybe moved a little bit forward, but you don't really have to, to begin with. But that's how we're gonna do the monk's head. No wiggling. So if you're at home and you're like, oh, I wanna wiggle, cause I want those lines. Don't do that yet. Everything comes in time, okay? All good things come with time. So what we're gonna do is, if you're at home, you can pause this video and try it after I try it. But I'm gonna show you what a monk's head looks like and how I'm going to manipulate all these lessons I've shown you, which is stretching the canvas, which is art as laying our base. Spout proximity, getting that picture as close as possible. We're gonna be talking about the flow rate and we're gonna be talking about the cup rotation. And I'm gonna point them all out as I'm doing it. And actually, if you're really wanting to play with latte art, the best way to get really nice crema from a side angle is to lift that cup up. The closer proximity between the cup and the spout, or if you have a bottomless, whatever it might be, the closer the proximity, the more crema you're gonna retain. The further the espresso has to drop, the more crema is gonna be dissipated. All right, so a little fun tip. Just get that cup really close up there if you're wanting to retain as much crema as possible. All right, now, watch from in front. You ready? I'm gonna take it. I'm getting close and I'll lift. Stop. I go just in the front and I'm just gonna pour and rotate. Spout proximity is really close. You see I'm like dipping in the picture. Boom. And we see we have a monk's head. All right, so as you saw, the first thing I did was I laid my base. I got close. I lifted up a couple of centimeters and I went side to side a little bit. If you stay in one place, foam can clump out. And so when you pour in, it's not integrated well. I like to go side to side to really integrate that steamed milk and that espresso. Then I stopped. I tilted. I rotated the cup till that liquid was at the lip. I got spout proximity. I got as close as I could. I started right here and look where the top of my shape is. And as I was rotating, pouring faster and faster and faster, there was that divot because remember what I said, I don't have a pen around me so I'm gonna use my finger. Wherever the pour is going, there's gonna cause a sinkhole. And that's why you have a little, cute little dimple right here, right? So there's a dimple there because I was pouring there. So there was constantly milk coming out. And you can also see what I mean by these little striations. You see those? That's some crema that creaked into our design. And the fact that they're circular like that shows that it was wrapping in to the sinkhole. Wherever the sinkhole is, it sucks everything around. So think about, oh, think about one of those sand time pieces, a vial, right? In the center, if you flip it upside down and the sand's going down, in the middle, there's a sinkhole and you see things falling into the sinkhole, right? Same thing happens here. It's the same thing. We're pouring milk and it's creating a sinkhole. So everything around it is trying to rotate into it. And that's why we have from above, you can see these little striations wrapping into where the sinkhole was. But this is the idea. I poured quicker and quicker and quicker, which you could see from that front angle. I was pouring quicker and quicker in order to get a full design that fully encapsulated the cup. Now, if you're wondering at home why there's bubbles in this cappuccino so quickly, even though my milk texture is incredible, it's because literally this coffee was roasted today. So I apologize for that. That is bubbles from CO2 releasing from the crema, but this will still pass our shake test. So don't you worry about my milk, all right? So that is a monk's head. We will do one more for good luck. So just watch closely, all right? We're gonna do one more. All right, so we're gonna take our milk. We're gonna set our base. So watch, I'll get close and then I'll lift up just an inch or two. Now I'm gonna stop, tilt the cup, spout proximity, and watch, I'm gonna pour faster and faster and faster. Look, I'm not moving forward with my pitcher at all. I'm staying right there, faster and faster and faster. Look at that, look at that, boom! All right, little monk's head, all right? See, it looks like the top of a monk's head and that's what people in coffee say. Don't really care about the title, but whatever, it works. Or you can say it's like a heart without the pointy end at the end, all right? So again, we can see that we have that little dimple on top because of the sinkhole we've created. Now, now that we have that going, with that shiny milk, that can do the lovely shake test, all right? Everyone loves the shake test. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right, so now we're gonna move on to the heart and the first thing you need to know is how to sink the center in order to get that little tail on the bottom. And we'll talk in a second about what that's called, which is the draw through. But first, I wanna really harp on this idea of a sinkhole being formed whenever you're pouring milk from the pitcher. It is literally causing a sinkhole. My finger, it's like there's a stream coming down, right? So wherever that is going, it's causing a sinkhole like a sand clock, right? Whenever that sand is flowing through in the sand, in the time vial, like on Aladdin, when they're trapped in the vial of sand and you're like, oh my goodness, what's going on? Well, we don't really care right now about Aladdin and Jasmine or whoever was in it. I can't even remember. But what we're really caring about is how the sand is flowing through that little hole, right? The sand creates a sinkhole and all the sand around it follows, right? Same thing happens when we're pouring milk. Wherever the milk stream is at, it's gonna cause a sinkhole and everything around it, all the foam, even if there's a design there, it's gonna wanna sink. And I'm gonna show you what I mean so that visually you have an understanding of what that really entails, all right? While you're pouring a design, wherever you're pouring, there's a sinkhole, right? And that will be displayed with this illustration. So watch this from right above, all right? We're gonna pour our base. We're gonna stop and I'm gonna start my pour, but watch. Here's a monk's head, I stop. Now watch this. I'm sinking the design. Look at this. Now there's no design. And remember I said the more full it gets, the harder it is to get a design. Look how tiny my little shape is. It's because it was so, what was the word? Concretized, not cementized. I don't know why I kept saying cement. It's so concretized. But as you saw from that visual, that sinkhole truly is sinking anything in its way. So I went side to side and was able to sink back that little monk's head that I created. So we're gonna manipulate that sinkhole in order to create a line through it as you saw me make a heart right there. I drew through it using that sinkhole. And so now we'll go into hearts and I'm gonna show you two different ways of doing a draw through. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk how do we make this monk's head into a heart? How do we get that little tail on the end? Well, I think you probably already know. We're gonna use our stream of milk coming out of the pitcher as a sinkhole and we're gonna control the sinkhole. Now, we're pouring that milk faster and faster and faster with the spout proximity as close as possible, right? Well, if we stay as close as possible and move forward, what's gonna happen? I'm gonna leave a little blank like we're in Dora the Explorer, you tell me what happens. That's right, it would just sludge forward. Foam would keep coming out because guess what? Our spout proximity is too close. We want gravity to come into effect. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna stay in that one position where we want the top of our heart to be and we're gonna slowly move forward while lifting up, all right? So there are two ways of doing what's called the draw through. Let me do it with both hands. Draw through, all right? I don't know how to use quotations apparently. So what we're gonna do is we're going to learn two different ways to do a draw through. I love this illustration. I can't remember who said this. I think it was my friend Mason Merrill in Austin, Texas. Can't be sure of that. Anyway, two different ways of doing what's called the draw through which really finishes every design you see, every time you see a nice symmetrical cut, it's from someone doing a draw through. One way of doing it is by when you're at the end and you have a little bit of space left, you do what's called the helicopter lift off. You slow your pour down, you take off like a helicopter and you fly away. So obviously the helicopter draw through, what that's doing is you're immediately stopping the foam from coming out when you lift up and then you do a draw through. You literally go forward with it and then when you get to the end of the cup, you stop your pour so you don't spill milk everywhere. And what will happen is that constant stream, my finger is a constant stream of milk. As it's going forward, it is literally cutting your design in half. It's sinking the center of your design. See what I'm saying? So you start with this, right? Because obviously you have the dimple just by nature because there was a sink hole where you're pouring and then you're going to draw down the middle and it's gonna take foam with it as you're drawing and it's sinking it and watch. Boop, that's what's gonna happen. Then you're gonna have a heart, all right? And you'll see it on the video here in a second. So that's one way of doing what's called a draw through. The other way is what is called the airplane liftoff. So when you're about, when you have a little bit left in the cup and you're ready to do your draw through, you slowly slow down and slowly increase. So as an airplane takes off like this, right? So you're slowly slowing down your pour and you're lifting off like that right there. So you got the helicopter, right? And you got the airplane liftoff, right? So those are the two ways of drawing through, all right? So we're gonna now do a heart and we're gonna use those. We're gonna do a monk's head. We're gonna do that design. And then before the cup is too full, we're gonna either do a helicopter, which is the easier one and I recommend for you to begin with, or we're gonna do the airplane, all right? Now the airplane is definitely a more stylistic choice. You don't have to do that. It's gonna make the heart more oblong, okay? And people really like to finish their pours with that if they're doing a really complex pour into what they call it dragging the heart. So it's that airplane pour. You're dragging the heart. Because you're slowly going up, there's still foam integrating into the design. So instead of just sinking it, it's still maintaining some of that foam in place, all right? So you can either do the airplane where you're dragging the design with your pitcher or you're gonna do the helicopter, which will immediately sink and you'll go through, make the cut. So let's do our heart. Let's swirl that espresso because it's so fresh. Bada bing. And I'm gonna do this for in front. So watch, I lay my base, I lift it. You see that? I'm gonna get really close. Pour faster, faster, faster, faster. Now watch, I'm almost full. And watch this, watch this. Helicopter, pull through. Look at that, we made a heart together. Everybody, yay. Give yourself a hand if you did it with me, right? So we did a little draw through right there. We see that? See that right there? Boom. All right, so everything that we've been talking about this whole time came into play right here. We stretched the canvas over that wooden frame. We laid our base. We did our three things. We did spout proximity. We got that spout really close. All right, we did cup rotation. We rotated the cup in order to center that heart really well, and we worked on our flow control. After we saw that initial bit of foam sit on top, we sped up, sped up, sped up, sped up, right? And at the very end, we helicopter. You slow down. So remember, you're speeding up, speeding up, speeding up, speeding up. Then you slow down when you're almost full so that you have control. If you keep going really fast, you might overflow. Slow down, helicopter, helicopter through. As you saw from that front angle, and we'll do it again right now. And boom, we're back to the video, all right? And now you're watching the video, and the video shows in slow motion that helicopter going up slowly. You see that? You see how full it's getting? And it's going through. And cut back to me because this is my show, not the Latte Arts. All right, so we've got our monk's head. We got our heart. Let's do one more heart together, and we'll call it quits on these things, and we'll wrap up with a little bit of talking. All right, so remember, we're gonna lay our base. We have our silky milky, right? We're gonna lay our base. We're gonna start real close, and you're gonna lift up like an inch or two, a couple centimeters. Stop. Close as possible, or faster, faster, faster, faster. You hear me talking. I'm talking to you. Everyone's doing it. And then we're gonna slow lift helicopter through. So you see that from in front? You saw that slow lift and helicopter through? And now you can see it from above that it looks like a heart, and bada bing, bada boom. That's all there is to a nice little latte art heart. And sorry, I sludged down the side. You know it's that nice texture if it sludges down the side, like it's a slug or something. It's just like viscous, and oh, again, everyone loves a shake test. All right, so as you see, now we have a heart. So this is the basics of latte art. Every design comes from the heart. That sounds really cheesy, but it's actually very literal. I'm not trying to sound cheesy, all right? I'm not Norah Jones singing you a song, right? I am teaching you latte art. All right, finger guns. All right, super cheesy right now. So every design comes from the heart. Every design that you see, whether it's those crazy-looking pegasus animals to really complex tulips to those rosettas that look like ferns, everything starts with that drop-in as if you were doing a heart, all right? So it's very important to get this shape down. To end, I just wanted to say thank you so much for watching this video. I am very open. If you want to send me a DM on Instagram with a video of you trying these, if you're running into difficulties, because like I said, certain people learn certain ways, and some might take longer than others, feel free to shoot me a DM of you pouring, and I'll critique it. I'm able to fix a lot of things from pictures and videos. So feel free to do that. It's just at Lance Hedrick, my name. That is my YouTube name. So at Lance Hedrick, no punctuation. Feel free to follow me there. Shoot me a DM with your video. Also, I would love it if you would subscribe. Obviously, every video ends this way, and it sounds so disingenuine, but the more subscribers I can get, obviously, the more I can invest into this channel and give you a lot more free education. So please subscribe, drop a comment, like the video, share it with friends, do all that good stuff to help boost my algorithm so that I can continue to invest in this channel, really make some high-quality videos for you to help you get around kind of what I talk about a lot, which is the gate-kept secrets of the industry, like this really nice training that is normally quite expensive. So I thank you for watching this. If you've made it this long, you are a true one. And again, feel free to drop comments. I'm really good at responding to those, or DMs. I'm happy to help however I can. Work on that helicopter and that airplane. Make your sound effects, as always. And again, if you haven't watched that milk-steaming video, it's linked here. If you haven't seen my Breville Bambino video, me pouring an incredible latte art on a $299 espresso machine, it's linked right there. So watch those, subscribe, and have an awesome day. See ya.