Chinese tea · marker pen on cheap stock
Drawn with a marker, in one pass
Thirty-four Chinese teas on cheap cream stock, each one ringed by hand-drawn bursts, tags and doodles, with the leaf cut out and pasted into the middle of the page.
Chinese tea · marker pen on cheap stock
Thirty-four Chinese teas on cheap cream stock, each one ringed by hand-drawn bursts, tags and doodles, with the leaf cut out and pasted into the middle of the page.
34 teas · 7 categories
Every line is drawn once, with a marker, and the wobble is kept rather than cleaned up. Skate graphics are built this way because they are printed cheaply on wood and paper in small runs and have to survive being photocopied, so the ink is heavy and the palette stops at black, one red and one blue on cream stock. Chinese tea is treated here like a sticker: photographed, cut out, outlined with the same fat pen and pasted where a drawing would normally go, which puts the real object in the middle of a page of scribbles. The small characters around it, a cup on a skateboard and a bag with legs, are there to make an unfamiliar tea approachable instead of reverent, because a first cup does not need ceremony. Type is lettered rather than typeset, which lets a long romanised name and its Chinese characters sit on one line at the same weight. Newsprint grain runs through the whole set so the paper stays cheap even on a screen.