Chinese tea · pen hatching, drips, rust red
Something is holding the tea out to you
Thirty-four Chinese teas drawn into metal-tee plates — dense pen hatching, spiky lettering with drips, black or speckled cream board, and one rust red.
Chinese tea · pen hatching, drips, rust red
Thirty-four Chinese teas drawn into metal-tee plates — dense pen hatching, spiky lettering with drips, black or speckled cream board, and one rust red.
7 teas · 5 categories
Every line here is drawn rather than rendered, and the drawing is doing one specific job: giving the tea a pair of hands. In almost every plate the figure is presenting the leaf, cradling a pressed block or gathering a heap, so the composition is about offering rather than menace. Hatching is the right technique for it because it describes bone, cloth and dry leaf with the same marks, which pulls the photograph and the illustration into one object instead of a cut-out pasted on a background. One added colour, rust red, carries the heat — an arch, a flame, a drip — and the rest is the black of the ink and the cream of the board. The lettering is spiky and dripping because that is the honest register of the reference, tour merch drawn by hand and screened badly on purpose. Dark Chinese teas belong in this frame more than delicate ones: aged pu-erh and heavily roasted oolong look like something dug up, and the drawing does not have to soften that to sell it.