Painting with tea

I am elated to have found a way to combine two things I absolutely love: painting and tea.

For years I have heard of people using various teas to stain paper and had always meant to try working with it as an art medium…but I never quite got around to it until recently when I was inking a sketch and stupidly rested my tea mug on my drawing, thus leaving a tea ring stain. Instead of crying about it I got super inspired and happily finished the drawing off by painting/staining it with my tea.
Here was the result:

"Ghostly love"

original tea painted pen and ink drawing

(Sold)

I showed the result off and people seemed just as excited about my tea painting as I was…so I started experimenting some more:

This time I set up with two different kinds of tea: Rooibos Chai and Hibiscus. I excepted the Rooibos chai to produce a nice warm sepia tone and the Hibsicus to stain a light magenta. I was right about the Rooibos's stain but was super surprised that the Hibiscus actually dried to a blueish/purple. 

See the result here:

"Merlady"

Original tea painted pen and ink drawing

(Available for $60.00 here.)

By this second tea painting I was 100% addicted and so I just kinda went nuts with it, doing more tea painting experiments, trying new teas, adding salt, trying new paper…and its been such a fun journey.

Here I started with a pencil sketch that I then inked.

After the sketch was inked I added some washes with Rooibos Chai and Hibiscus tea

Once the tea was dry I went back in and thickened up my ink lines

"Lounging SpEYEn creature lady"

Original tea painting on pen and ink drawing

(sold)

This is a screen shot from a Live periscope broadcast I did as I painted with tea for the first time on watercolor paper( I had been painting with tea on sketch paper with the first few.)

A peek at my messy painting desk, full of tea cups!

"Third Eye Creature Lady"

Tea painted pen and ink drawing on watercolor paper

(Available for $60.00 here.)

Because I had been getting such a great response from people in regards to my tea painting I decided to run a limited edition print sale, in which I would hand paint each print with tea! 

I chose to work with my Wednesday Adams original pen and ink sketch, which was a very fitting choice for a print release in October! 

I decided the edition with be limited to 10 prints, each hand painted with tea.

After I was painting each print, I signed and numbered them. 

They sold out in a few short days, thus I feel very encouraged to begin doing limited editions like this for each month. So, stay tuned as I will be choosing my print for Novemeber soon! 

In conclusion, I am absolutely obsessed with tea painting and can't wait to share my adventures with it as an art medium. More updates soon! Keep a look out on my etsy shop, as I am posting my newly finished tea paintings for sale and they are going quick.

Much love!

-Chelsea Rose