TEABAGGIN’: A CUBICLE PASTTIME
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | Permalink
Leonardo da Vinci used to suggest that art students “look at any walls spotted with various stains,” so as to “arouse the mind to various inventions.” Sandro Botticelli liked to throw a sponge wet with colored paints against a wall, then search out new landscapes in the resulting splatter.—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
This is a fun little cubicle Rorschach activity that I ripped off of Dave Gray. I found it while reading through Bill Keaggy’s “100 Pieces of Paper and The Stories Behind Them.”
I switched from coffee to tea at work, so every morning I take an index card and set my tea bag down on it, letting the card soak up the tea. Then, I shop for images on the card, and riff off those with some doodles and captions.
Nothing serious, just fun way to pass a couple minutes and find some ideas. You could probably do it with coffee rings, too. They’d be like little ensos.
Related: Christoph Niemann’s coffee-on-napkin drawings.
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May 27th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Tea vs. Coffee!
I happened upon your blog via the story about you & the Winston Smith Green Day album cover. And, as funny things go, I’ve been recently doing a similar sketchbook-type project with coffee rings. I’ve just begun putting these up, but you can take a peek here.
I’ve shared this on my tumblr as well, lauriebreaker.tumblr.com, and feel free to link me up if you’d like, or if you’re ever up for a tea-bag stain vs coffee ring battle (or collaboration?) please give me a shout!
Cheers,
Laura
May 27th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Thanks for sharing, Laurie!
May 28th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Bruce Turner posted his first attempt on Twitter:
May 28th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Cool dude. Clouds, stains, clumps of foliage, all great fodder for the imagination.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:25 am
Ha! This is a very nice non-digital distraction for the brain..
Reminds me of Colin Ware’s random squiggles + thoughtfully placed dot + wedge = bird
June 5th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Thanks, ya’ll.
Paul, do you have a link for that Colin Ware work?
June 11th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Matt Madden has posted an activity that could be really complimentary—I’d like to merge the two…maybe let the teabags drop, and then draw panels, then draw…
June 28th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
[...] this second batch of tea bag doodles, I merged a little activity I stole from Dave Gray via Bill Keaggy with another activity I got from [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Hi, great stuff here. Doodle on! I think Dali wrote about this method, he had a great name too: paranoid critical method. It also suggests how the old school witches read tea leafs. mmmmmmm tea!
June 30th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Thanks, Paul! Here’s more on Dali’s paranoiac-critical method and Max Ernst’s frottage technique, too.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
[...] Meanwhile, Austin Kleon demonstrates one of the ways he keeps creatively loose. He creates drawings out of teabag stains. For more on this, click the image. clipped from http://www.austinkleon.com [...]
July 8th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
[...] Kleon shows how he goes from order to chaos in this [...]
September 1st, 2009 at 11:20 am
These are great!!