Tea-stained Sketchbook

Ever since we used the technique to make a pirate map in Grade 4, I've been a huge fan of tea-staining. Not only does it look gorgeous, something about the process gives the paper just a little bit more tooth too.

I've been wanting to do a collection of small illustrations on tea-stained paper, and figured it would be best to stain all the paper at once, so I was ready to go whenever inspiration strikes. 98 cups of tea later, I had myself an entire tea-stained sketchbook. It means the backs of the pages look a bit drab, but that doesn't matter at all.

(Oh, have I mentioned I like pocketwatches?)

I just grabbed a cheap sketchbook, so I wasn't worried about destroying it (I may have been swayed by the cute string enclosure too). The plan is to wander around our yard every other day to find something to draw - seedpods, leaves, flowers, insects... that kind of thing. I've already started a "to draw" collection of found bits and pieces. Call it back-up for a rainy day.

I won't have time to start it for about 6 weeks, but I'm looking forward to it! A regular walk around the garden might even help me notice when the plants require that thing they need - I've been told it's called watering.

Sturdy.

I finally bought myself a proper easel last week. Usually I only use my desk easel, which is fine most of the time, but once I'm sitting a heavy board on it and extending it over the edge of my desk, the whole thing just overbalances and topples if you breath wrong. So, it's nice to be able to work on a large artwork without having to tiptoe around it for fear of a crash-bang disaster. (Even if it does take up even more room in my little 3 x 3m studio.)

I was hoping to enter this piece in a drawing show, but now I'm saving it for something a little later in the year, which will allow me plenty of time to get obsessive over little details. I just need to remember come summertime, that the top of the easel extends just up between the blades of my ceiling fan, or the crash-bang disasters will return...

Results

I'm very happy with how the paper turned out. I'm a huge fan of tea staining, and a huge fan of distressed-looking backgrounds. The granules of tea worked perfectly as a mask of sorts to block tiny areas of the black paint, while adding all kinds of texture surprises in other areas.

This is a 22x30" piece of paper, ready to go now for a charcoal and chalk drawing I'm hoping to have finished by the end of the week!

Lately...

There hasn't been quite enough art making going on. But, that has been because we are trying to get our house and yard in order (it's a huge task!), plus I've had family visiting, so that's a fair exchange.

I finally got a tiny bit of art time in on my lunch break, but while I was tea-staining some paper in preparation for a charcoal drawing, the teabag I was using broke apart. After an initial freak-out and a few colourful words, I decided to call it a happy accident, and just rip the rest of the teabag to bits and sprinkle the contents all over the page. I then doomed another three teabags to the same fate, mashing them into the page finger-painting style. Since this well and truly got me in the mess-making mood, I also sprayed some thinned black paint about for good measure, and splashed some more tea about with my fingers.

I'm hoping it creates the interesting background I have pictured in my head, once it's dried. I'm resisting the urge to blast the whole thing with my heat gun, like my usual impatient style, since I suspect I'll get a better result if I leave it to dry in its own sweet time. Of course it's raining and cold so that sweet time is an irritatingly long time, so I'm getting myself a lesson in patience.

Art-making happy accidents. I love them. It's also a lovely change from my far more frequent oh-crap-I-just-destroyed-my-last-eight-hours-of-work kind of accidents. Fingers crossed it works!