The Seed - Lets hope we flourish!!
The First Step of the Brief
I have been asked to Document my current exsisting
knowlage of a Tea Bag. This will include me drawing, writing and documenting
the Tea Bag in a mannor of ways.
Good Day In't Studio
Had a really productive day, started to get really visual and bring ideas, words and phrases out of the sketchbook and working larger and with different media. This has worked wonders for me! Here are a few of the new visual links that I made today that I think are really promising for quality outcomes. From the sound of the tea bag been thrown in to my hand it made me think of playing with bean bags at school. This then sparked off the idea of making a bean bag out of tea bags. I think this will be quite nostalgic to interact with. This may or may not work but it will make for good exploration and play. Another visual link which I made today was whilst sketching the tea bags, the tea leaves make a three dimensional landscape. This lead me on to thinking how to visualy represent these thoughts and trying different methods to show this should be fun and keep the visuals coming.
Above
Think this may be a little to harsh and noticeable. Will try to make it slightly more subtle.
Above
This one works a little better. I think because its more vast expance of landscape it fit within the contours of the tea leaves. This works well but I think that trying to make the landscape 3D out of the tea leaves will prove challenging and would make for good exploring.
Get the super glue out!
Inital Idea - Strengths of Tea
Above
Just playing arround with the fact that people have tea at different strengths.
Infusion Of Tea
This was looking at how tea reacted with the water initally. Doing this with boiling hot tea was quite hard, so I have chose to tackle this by using watercoulour paints. Here are some snaps of the results.
It's a tad poor quality but visually it is really nice!!
Drawing with Tea Bags
This is done from using the tea bags own natural colours and some watercolours for deeper and richer coulours.
Teascapes
Tescapes - The images look more realistic the smaller they get. (Squint your eyes!!)
Teascape1
Teascape2
No such thing as a bad idea?
This is a shot from above a Teascape.
Teascape
Had some real fun playing round with just the tea leaves today! The whole idea spans from sketching the tea bags initially and making a connection with the way the tea leaves sat in the tea bag and mountainous landscapes it seeming produces. Landscapes plus Tealeaves equals 'Teascapes'. This was real fun and became real excited about doing it! I set out to make real tactile landscapes, that I could pick up and move. So using PVA and Craft Spray I was on a mission to achieve this. Like most of my initial Ideas this did not work so well, as all the tea leaves just stuck to my fingers and was impossible to mould and manipulate in to the shapes I desired. Quick was of the hands and and a think over a brew. I just decided to pour all the tea leaves out on to the infinity curve, and just like that there was a 'Teascape' in front of my eyes!! It wasn't perfect but it was a step in the right direction. It took a while and a few different compositions to get the desired effect I wanted. Found out that the best shots were with the camera flat on the window ledge. This gave an illusion of scale and puts you right in the 'Teascape'. Spot on!! Going to expand on my Teascpaes and see where I end up.
T Type
This was just playing after I had done the Teascape shots...!!
I <3 Tea
Tea Bag Bean Bag
Material Sensitivity
Material Sensitivity
After a talk with the tutors in the studio they advised that I should be more sensitive to the materials that I am using. For example when painting the delicate infusion paintings at first, I was picking out the landscapes with a black pen and pencil this was very distracting from the subtlety of the light water-colours and tea stains. So I set out to be more sensitive to the materials. I started off buy purchasing a variety of different papers with different texture, weights and absorbencies. The idea was to try paint as light as possible, this was quite a task at first but by the end I think I got the hang of it. This was quite fun because the different papers react to the water-colour in different ways. The ones I found that work much better was the lighter more crinkled paper. I associate the crinkles with a used up tea bag. The big surprise was the the high gloss paper, I bought it out of curiosity to see how the water-colour reacted on the surface. It did not absorb straight away but this gave me time to make some nice marks that had nice tone gradients.
Applying Forces
The Big Tea Bag
Started of with me searching for Muslin, which I thought was pronounced muesli. The lady at the haberdashery had a right good laugh at me. When she ripped my meter square section of muesli she made it look easy. I resorted to more familiar techniques to cut it.
Would never make a good surgion.
Then Agian..!?
Poor quality photo. But it gives a good scale. This is a big tea bag.
Is this the big tea bag or a normal tea bag... Ill let you be the judge.
Masking tape included for a sence of scale.
This reminds me of 3D rendered maps.
Real Zoomed In.
This was really good today gave us chance to see what our classmates thought of our work. Even just siting down afterwards and looking at what was written about my work sparked of lots of new idea's.
Its amazing what fresh eyes see in your work!!
Pink Post-it's are other classmates veiws.
Yellow Post-it's are what i need to crack on with!!
Yellow Post-it's are what i need to crack on with!!
Baking a 'Tea Cake'
The Team Sheet!! (Lets Bake)
Half Mesurements
To try give the cake a more tea like feel, ive thrown abit of red food colouring in't mix!
Light and Fluffy My Arse
(speaking in hindsight)
110's kitchen surface makes for good photography!
This was an interesting association, grated chocolate looks like tea leaves..!!
Cooking Photo...
Hmmmm this looks like good aim after a night on the tiles..
And agian..!!
Applying for the great Glaswegian Bake Off
BUNS
Remember 'Light And Fluffy'
Anything but..
This was the first attempt at the 'Tea Cake'....
It tasted like I had spilt tea on a pancake and still ate it...
Made some nice photographs!
(matter of opinion)
Our Survey Said...!?
Note: spelling mistakes *Brand
This bit was quite daunting, thought it would be rubbish but it turned out to be quite funny..! Some off the responses which I got shocked me! I was positive that the majority of people would like there cups of tea to be brewed longer for a more stronger taste..!! This has opened up more questions that I would like to answer like dose the local water effect the taste of tea and the time you would allow the tea bag to brew for? Somethings did not surprise me on the other hand as I knew Yorkshire Tea would be one of the favourites! Everyone also had the exact same method of brewing! Tea Bag, Boiling Water Then Milk! Standard Procedure all round by the looks of things!
This whole process lead me to think of info graphics about tea and how each individual like there tea. Then I wanted to put this info into a chart and show the different colours that tea went at the different brewing stages so that you can always be sure to have a perfect cup of tea each time just by identifying the colour against the chart.!
I wanted to do this because I think you can associate weather its a good brew or a bad brew just by the colour!
This is just a mock up of what I think it would look 'The Tea Scale' would look like!
I would really like to do this! Photogrpah the colour of the tea at each point and then plot it on the scale.
This also reminds me of when i was painting using tea, and I would test the colour before useing it.
Looking At Fair Trade Tea
This was on the fairtrade website. Think its interesting to look at the value of the tea market in comparison to my survey results.!
I find this infomation shocking. A full days work and only getting that amount of money.
The major companys do a great job sugar coating these scary facts!
This is the Tea Chart, after all of my exploration of tea the one thing that stood out, was the way in which we judge tea from the inital colour of it. This is an informative chart that lets you evaluate what your ideal brew should be.
