A Spot of Tea - Literally

With a recent dinner at Village Tavern I ordered this beautifully served cup of hot tea.  My strong urge of course was to paint the beautiful light and form of this tea arrangement. There is just something about white china or pottery.

In my purse I discovered I didn't have my watercolors or a paintbrush. But I did have a sketchbook and a water soluble graphite pencil -- just nothing to make washes with the graphite - no brush.  So I realized in a spark of creativity and resourcefulness that I could use the wet used teabag to paint this page! If you look closely you can see that it's still wet in the photo. I squeezed the teabag to make a nice wash and how authentic and appropriate that it is actually a wash of pure TEA! It also served to dissolve the graphite lines into a nice was to produce the values. I had a glue stick so I was able to glue the teabag tags and papers on the page. What a memory!