Let's Get Makey: The Joy of Painting with Tea

The Joy of Painting with Tea

Hi, it's Patti Campbell again! Today I am switching it up from my usual tutorial style post. I want to talk to you about what I've been doing these past couple of weeks. Over in the CoMOONity, we have been working on a tea themed swap. I wanted to do something different so I decided on experimenting with using a variety of teas as paint. I am a tea lover so I had a wide variety of tea on hand.

In small glass jars I brewed a number of different teas. Who knew there were so many different colors of tea? I created a swatch card so I would know what they looked like when they dried, and numbered the jars and swatches accordingly. It was surprising to see how some of the colors changed as they dried. I had a cranberry tea that was red in the jar but dried purple.

The first thing I painted was a couple of ladies with flower crowns on two different types of watercolor paper. The tea reacted differently on the different papers. Interestingly the cranberry tea dried purple on one paper and green on the other.

Just for fun I tried to paint some abstracts with tea. I splattered and dropped tea onto the paper as well as using a paintbrush and they were fun to do.

The tea behaved much like watercolor. I had to let each layer dry completely before adding the next. It does however take much longer to dry than watercolor paint.

Next I tried stamping. I attempted to stamp with the tea on an old book page. This was not very successful. The tea was too pale and didn't show up. Then I tried it on watercolor paper and that also didn't work out. The image was too blurred.

Then I tried it on fabric. To my surprise this was successful. I used a paintbrush to apply a small amount of tea to the stamp and then carefully applied the stamp to the fabric. I pressed it down firmly and held it down for a few seconds. The result was a clean, opaque image.

I started thinking of other ways to play with the tea on fabric and landed on tye dye. I tied the fabric and used three different colors of tea in the sections. I wrapped the fabric in plastic wrap and let it sit overnight. The next day I took it out of the plastic and let it dry. I removed the string and I was pleasantly surprised with my results. I really enjoyed this and will definitely do it again in the future.

I wanted to keep experimenting so I went back to my watercolor paper and stamped with ink, then filled in the images with tea to varying degrees of success. You really have to make sure that ink is dry. I got the best results when I heat set the ink before filling it in.

One of the stamps I used was the Diamond Moon ArtFoamie by Rita Barakat. I stamped it in Moonlight Duo in Deep Space Blue. After letting the ink dry completely I painted it in with several different tea colors. After the tea dried I cut it out. Happy with the results, I thought it might be fun to stich it to a piece of fabric. I really like the way it is turning out.