Tea Twins - A New Grouping

I tried a series of sketches until I landed on a favorable grouping of teabags.  As with other relief prints, I began with the pencil sketch, darkened the desirable lines with black India ink, then created the transfer sheet using 6B soft graphite pencil on transfer paper.  Below, on the left, is the soft graphite image on the transfer paper, ready to move to the Speedball softcut material. 

Tea Twins - Soft graphite drawing on transfer paper.  Notice that the composition has been shifted to be contained within the sides of the Speedball softcut boundaries. 

Tea Time with Tea Twins - relief print proof #1.  Black Ranger ink on Strathmore 300 series printmaker paper. 

After pulling the first proof, I went back in with the smallest "V" blade to open up more of the tea leaves in both of these tea bags.  I still need lots of practice on the carving into these little, tight spaces, but it is fun to try.

I was also surprised by the shadow lines that picked up ink outside of tea bag.  Because these images nicely fill the space in the relief block, I didn't think that random crests in the open-carved areas would ride high enough to catch ink from the flat ink pad........wrong.  I went back in and tried to cut away some of the crests, but might have to remove border material to avoid the shadow ink lines completely.

Tea Time with Tea Twins - relief print proof #2.  Black Ranger ink on Strathmore 300 series printmaker paper. 

Notice in the second proof, how much the tea leaf area is open.  When hand coloring these areas, filling in the leaves with a range of colors with close down the spaces some, but create a much more interesting image to look at - AND - it might look more like loose tea before the hot water plunge!!  Also notice that in this second proof, the shadow ink lines are gone - got lucky!!!