Tea in Paris

I haven't posted in a while, due to being incredibly busy with a building amount of uni work, and returning home to essex for easter. So heres a brief catch up on some of the stuff I've been working on for the last few weeks! 

My project has come to a point where I am finalising ideas and bringing my creative thoughts together. My favourite part of a project! For this project it has been slightly frustrating because I had a good idea of where I wanted to go with it from the beginning. But obviously a great deal of research and planning had to be done before I could dive straight in. 

My brief, based around tea of course, initially got me thinking about the origins of tea, which happens to be china. So why does Britain hold such a common stereotype for 'the home of tea'? Well, this is all down to tea consumption in our little country. Believe it or not, us Brits are drinking an average of 165 million cups daily, thats 60.2 billion per year! So no wonder we hold the title of the tea nation. 

Painted background (actually using nail varnish, use what ya got)
then scanned into photoshop, along with a bit of typography, colour added and boosted. 

No wonder other nationalities see us in this light. This got me thinking, what do other nationalities really think about English people? Do they still believe we prance around London wearing top hats and petticoats? Someone from the deepest depths of Texas that doesn't even own a passport would probably provide a similar estimation. However we all here know that we are no different to anyone else. But I think its quite amusing that there are people out there that think this. So for my Narrative Illustration piece I have decided to base it from the perspective of the French. Partly because I am fascinated by French culture, and I want to play around with mixing British and French culture together, and lastly because French stereotypes are also quite amusing, much like our own.

In Portsmouth, where I study currently, the architecture is a mixture of lots of different time periods. Unfortunately, most of the buildings are new and not particularly nice to look at, but there are some small snapshots of the city that are actually really cool! This is the back of an apartment block near to my own. It reminded me of a sort of vintage/rustic apartment block in a city like Paris or New York. 

I wanted to pick up on the French feel, so I added a few extras, and tried to link it with tea of course!

This is the final result. Paper blotched all over with a tea bag, and a drawing scanned in and placed over the top in Photoshop. A little community set in Paris, with a tea shop in the centre that ultimately brings people together, as it does every day in the UK!


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