BLUE TEA AND RED-GREEN VINEGAR – MORE TEABAG STAIN EXPERIMENTS

Shoshi the Mad Scientist has been at it again.

Blue teabags

I saw a video on YouTube recently where someone was making teabag art from Butterfly Pea teabags. I had never heard of this before, and was intrigued. The tea is an intense blue. It is made from blue sweet pea flowers from South-East Asia.

I ordered a small pack on Ebay from Sri Lanka. There are 15 small teabags, and I made a glass of tea using one of them.

I have to say that despite the gorgeous colour, the tea itself is pretty tasteless! However, I didn’t buy it primarily to drink, but to make art.

Improving my technique

Reusing the teabags

I have learnt that I can get a lot more mileage out of a single teabag than I have done previously when making the stains. Once the first stain has been made, you can “recharge” the teabag by dipping it back into the tea and squeezing it out gently. You then lay it down again on the paper and it works just like the first time. I am amazed how many times I have been able to use a single blue teabag so far. I am handling it very carefully as it feels fragile when wet.

Alternative papers

My hubby took a sheet of my weird glazed watercolour paper over to his friend’s, and his wife, a water colour artist, said she thought it was Arches Aquarelle paper. I’m not entirely sure about this because that paper has an imprinted watermark on the corner, and mine does not. Also, that paper is pretty expensive, and I didn’t want to buy it if it turned out not to be the same. I have still got quite a few sheets left, but I have no idea what it is or where it came from, so I can’t order any more.

I decided to try using something else. I have a pack of thin Japanese calligraphy practice paper which is coated on one side, and it has that same slightly waxy feel. I thought it might stain well with teabags. I do not know if this is rice paper because it doesn’t say so on the pack. It feels like heavy tissue paper, and it works extremely well for this technique. It’s much thinner than the watercolour paper but I think it will lay down well as collage paper, and the unstained parts may disappear into the background in the same way that tissue paper does. This remains to be seen.

My first blue teabag stains

The initial blue tea stains are quite pale, but as you add more layers, the colour at the edges of the stains is intensified.

At the top right in the next photo, you can see this blue teabag replaced on the first stain once it was dry. Middle left wasn’t a success, but middle right was pretty good. Nice frilly edges in each case. At the top of the photo you can see the glass of blue tea that I made, together with a bottle of pink vinegar (further details below on this).

In the next photo, the teabag at top left has been removed, recharged with tea and placed on the very pale stain at centre left. It is already forming a rather irregular-shaped stain. A further layer has been added to the middle right one. I left this on a bit too long and the stain has reached almost to the edge of the first layer. The stains move quite fast so you need to keep an eye on them if you want to get decent concentric rings with spaces between.

What about those green stains at the bottom?

Pickled red onion

I made some pickled red onion recently.

It is very easy to make: you just boil up some white vinegar with a bit of sugar and seasoning, and steep finely sliced red onion in it. The vinegar quickly turns a gorgeous pinky-red. This pickle is absolutely delicious – much milder than normal pickled onions which I dislike. I wondered if I could use this pink liquid to stain my papers with, and carefully dropped a small quantity onto the watercolour paper with a spoon.

Then came the surprise – as it dried, it turned from pink to green! I have no idea why this should happen.

I dropped a little granulation medium onto the stain on the right while it was still wet, to see if it would granulate, but nothing happened! Not surprising really as this was simply stained vinegar and had no actual pigment in it, but I thought it was worth a try.

Using Japanese calligraphy paper

Some normal green teabag stains being formed at the top of the sheet. They spread out too much and all joined together. I am not sure how useful these will be.

I noticed that the blue tea stains on this paper formed rounded shapes with very little indentation, which was a bit disappointing. This is a feature I really like on the watercolour paper – it is almost fractal like.

However, when I added subsequent layers by reapplying the recharged teabag, the indentations appeared. I am not sure why this should happen.

You can see how the colour is intensified with the addition of further layers.

If I accidentally splash a bit of tea on the first stain when I lay the teabag back down, this tends to spread and join up with the new stain, which rather spoils the effect.

Further layers formed.

I think these are really beautiful. You can add as many layers as you like, to fill the shape formed by the first stain. The effect on the Japanese paper is lovely, and it penetrates right through to the reverse side as well.

I am going to get some rice paper and see how that works. The rice paper should be a bit thicker than this practice calligraphy paper, which I bought to use with the gel plate.

Staining with or without teabags

When I made the stains with the vinegar, they remained more or less circular and didn’t spread as much as the tea. I think that just dropping a little tea onto the paper, rather than using a teabag, would produce a similar result. The teabag controls the formation of the stain and stops it drying out too quickly to form a decent sized stain, complete with indentations. I am going to try dipping a used teabag into the vinegar and forming stains, to see what happens. If I use the blue teabag, I might get an interesting blend of colours.

There are so many variables with these experiments – the nature of the tea itself, the paper and its coating, how wet the teabag is to start with, etc. These stains do not spread at all on normal watercolour paper; they just make interesting shapes where the scrunched up teabag has made contact with the paper. I have been using this method for years, and the shapes are gorgeous for doodling on. The spreading stains were a complete surprise, when I started using the coated watercolor paper. At first I thought it was a disaster, but realised just how beautiful they could be, especially with the addition of further layers.

I am also amazed just how much mileage you can get out of a single teabag, by recharging it with tea after each use. My little pack of 15 blue teabags is going to last a long time! Eventually I shall dry the teabag and empty out the contents, and I shall be able to use the bag itself in art projects. It is a shame that these particular blue teabags are so small, and they are the pillow type, sealed on all four corners. I would much prefer to have had the US type of bag, made from a single larger sheet of teabag paper, folded and secured with the string, but I expect I shall be able to use them nonetheless.

Thoughts on further use of the blue tea

A couple of years ago I made some absolutely gorgeous coffee-stained paper using plastic table runners.

I think I could get similar results using the blue tea. It will be interesting to see.