I am very aware that it has shamefully been almost a month since my last blogpost, whoops. This past month has been pretty hectic with regards to uni and I'm ecstatic to say that my first year is fully complete! My tea project was beginning to take it's toll on me as it came to a close, probably the most stressed I have been during one of my assignments. But it all came together in the end, thankfully.
In my last post, I featured one of my drawings of a scene centred around tea, with a sort of french theme to it. Well, that wasn't the rout I went down in the end. I began to research more into the production of tea, because I felt that the research aspect of my work was weak, consequently stumbling across tea plantations. Tea is one of the main exports from Sri Lanka, a place that I visited as a child and that had a strong impact on me. My memories of the trip are filled with the abundance of beauty in the landscapes, and the incredible colours that enrich the environment. It's truly an incredible place and definitely somewhere I aspire to return to at some point in the future. Whilst I was there, probably about ten years ago now, my family and I visited a tea plantation. The people seemed mildly joyful, with smiles on their faces. As a child I envied them, being able to live and work in such a beautiful environment. however I did have a sense that their happiness wasn't entirely genuine, simply because they were in the presence of tourists. The reality for these people is long gruelling hours in the hot sun, segregation from the rest of Sri Lankan society, harsh working conditions, extremely little pay and even child labour. As I continued researching the plantations I became growingly surprised at the information I was coming across, and this memory that I had in my head of the happy people at the plantation became slightly disturbing, especially as we were there to observe, blissfully unaware of the cruel reality that we were at witness to.
This inspired me. Which was great because up until that point I was pretty much running on steam, praying for an idea to pop into my head. I knew I wanted to make a love story, but a love story can be painfully tedious if theres nothing more to it. The story that I eventually made was short but sweet. It followed a young girl and boy who met, fell in love, and ran away together. But with all of the information I had gathered I knew I could make it into more than that. They met on a tea plantation, both close to loosing the will to live due to their lack of freedom in life. They found companionship in each other and that encouraged them to live out their dreams. They spent their lives picking tea leaves, but they never got to drink tea, so they wanted to travel somewhere that they could experience life on the other side of the spectrum. So together they immigrate to England, and live happily ever after. Theres more to it than that, as is explained in my work that I have previously submitted, so I can't access it unfortunately. Nor can I access my final piece to take photos of it. But I have a photo of the first two illustrations from the story (which was hung on a string as a form of bunting to resemble a timeline... also explained within my submission)
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| awful photo. Tea stained paper, then illustrated in fine liners, and painted with water colour. Completing this was possibly the most stressful thing I have had to do in my life. Each one is bigger than my head, and there were 9 of them, and as I am a master of procrastination I had only left myself with about 2 days in which to complete them. Not my finest hour.
So now that my submissions are over for the year I can finally get back to living my life. I'm planning on making daily (this is probably very wishful thinking and may turn to weekly sooner than I'd hope) blog posts for this blog over the summer! Thats definitely a tall order, but the aim is to draw/create more so hopefully this'll be a great way for me to finally start doing that!
Thanks for reading/taking a look.
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