Playing around

I love reusing tea bags in my artwork.   Fortunately for me there seems to be no shortage of them at our house.  I love the look, transparency, the feel and their durability.  Sometimes the color of them can be a challenge.  In my head I wanted these flowers to be a brighter pink, but many times with the tea bags you get a darker color.  Of course it depends too on what kind of tea was in the bag.  My morning Chai makes for a darker tea bag, while my afternoon  green tea is usually very light colored.

When I want a truer color I choose the lightest tea bags as possible.  These flowers were painted with watercolors and then I used acrylic paint and white ink for the stripes.  Usually I paint them with a very watered down acrylic, like the brown circles in the painting.  When you use acrylics though you loose a lot of the transparency. 


 
                                                                            Print available here.


My goal for this painting was to just play around a little bit with the tea bags and  especially with patterns.  It started out feeling very rigid and tight, but I feel like I got over that and I'm feeling happy with the results.