Now, who's going to pour the tea?

September just flew by, and last week was so busy that I had to give Paint Party Friday a miss. I had actually managed to finish a painting the weekend before, but I just never got round to edit the photos, and put it all into a blog post. But this week, things are back to normal again, and I'm very happy to finally share the painting, made after the sketch in my art journal page that I made first.

Again I kept it simple, with just a little bit of collage bits added. Instead of the map, I used some book paper here to give the table cloth some texture. The photo below also has my favourite, handmade tea cup in it. It really was just the perfect cup. But unfortunately, I've smashed it to pieces in the mean time, by droping a full jar of honey on it, and splashing the freshly made Sencha tea in it all over my kitchen.

Talking about photo editing. Taking photos of my paintings really drives me mad. Getting the right light is a challenge, and reproducing the exact colours seems simply impossible. Even with tweaking everything in Lightroom and Photoshop. Well, this is what the whole painting looks like...

40x40cm, acrylic, no title yet

... but these are more like the actual colours. It's not such a great difference, but you can still see it clearly in the shades of the tea pot (let alone in comparison to the actual colours in the original painting), and it really drives me mad. I'll have to keep working on that.

I'm thinking about going through my kitchen cupboards and cabinets to get all my tea pots out, and to turn them into a little series. And I've got some other ideas for tea paintings too. It's going to be a proper tea party.

But now it's time for a nice cup of tea, while having a look at what everyone else has been

 busy with over at the wonderful  

Paint Party Friday.

Life is like a pot of tea...

After my thoughts about art journaling and how I want to use my art journal, I decided to use it to try out an idea I had in my head for a painting. My beloved, but rather neglected tea pot, that somehow got itself to the very back of the cupboard. It's a wonderful little tea pot that is about three times as big inside as it looks from the outside. Amazing. I guess the inspiration for painting it came from a repeat of Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea, an excellent two part series about "Britain's love affair with tea", that was on the other day. Isn't it funny, how inspiration sometimes comes from the most unexpected places?

I want to paint it on a canvas, but decided to make a version in my art journal first. It's an excellent way to try out and see what works, and it also has the advantage that, should I ever actually get to selling a painting, I'll still have a version of it in my journal. I wanted to keep it very simple. Just the teapot on a patterned table cloth.

I was lucky to get about four big bags of all kinds of maps from all over the world recently, and I decided to use one as a background.

My collection of dried used tea bags to be used for some future tea art projects is every growing, and I took one of the labels add it onto the page. It comes from a most delicious butter mint tea that I discovered earlier this year. Tastes like minty toffee. Mmhhhh. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it anymore when I was in England, three weeks ago. And there's no way that something like butter mint tea would ever make its way to Switzerland.

Even though I'm now quite happy with the thought of art journal pages without any words at all, I decided I wanted to add a tea quote - "Life is like a pot of tea, it's all in how you make it". Next now is the canvas. The design's already drawn up and I'm just waiting for the weekend, to get my paints out.

Now I suggest you make yourself a nice cup, or pot, of tea, and hop over to Paint Party Friday to enjoy all the fabulous and inspiring art work that is shared there today.

TeaArt

I'm back from a most wonderful and relaxing 10 days holiday in beautiful Dorset. 10 blissfull days of lots of walking on the beach, on top of the cliffs and through enchanted woods, picturesque little villages, cosy country pubs, stunning views, carpets of bluebells, and simply irresistible, delicious cream teas.

I took loads of photos (will try to share some of them here soon), and I also did some sketches for each day on some of the evenings, but they are still in their early stages, and will need much more work yet. I'm hoping to make some time for working on them during the weekend, but I just can't wait to be back at the party again. So for today, I'm sharing a little project I did just before I left - a little bit of TeaArt in my trusted Moleskine art journal.

It all started with some tea bags of sleepy tea from one of my most favourite brands of tea, Clipper Teas (which coincidentally happen to be based in Dorset!) I had left lying around in the kitchen.

When I wanted to throw them away, I noticed the beautiful warm brown colour of the dried bags. Wouldn't it be lovely to use them for some background for a journal page, or something? So I kept saving the tea bags.

Once I had enough, I carefully cut them up, ...

... pasted them unto a page in my Moleskine journal, added a bit of white to bring out the textures, and finally added a little, simple sketch. A tea pot and cup just seemed the obvious thing.

I really like to use Moleskine sketchbooks for art journals. They have a good size for smaller, less elaborate pages. I like to use them most of all as a kind of reference for different ideas and techniques. They are my little idea collections, which I occasionaly get back to for ideas to use for a biger painting, and they are also my little documentation of some of my little experiments and ideas. I love all the layers of the different pages when the journal begins to fill up.

Linking up to the wonderful Paint Party Friday again. I can't wait to go and see what everyone has been up to while I was enjoying my holiday! Have a wonderful, creative weekend everyone!