Tea & Toast

A tea-themed experiment

A little while back I was chatting with Emily Dubious about drawing prompts or themes, and she told me about her tea goblins - a little series based on some of the different tea blends from Bird & Blend. Since she had an excess of teas at the time, she left me with the Tea & Toast blend to try… so I thought as well as drinking it I’d have a go at creating a dragon for the blend too!

“English breakfast tea with sweet raspberry jam”

The blend contains: Indian Assam black tea, Kenyan black tea, hibiscus, freeze dried raspberries, apple pieces, rosehip, and red cornflowers.

So… a lot of red things, as it turns out! Admittedly I did have other colour options for the hibiscus flower, but when I looked up hibiscus tea specifically all the images I found featured the red version so I stuck with that!

Composition

When I drank the tea, I found the sweet note makes for a very… ‘sit back somewhere comfy, possibly with a cosy blanket’ kind of feeling. Warm, sweet, relaxed. So I decided my dragon should be sitting comfortably, with a relaxed posture and calm face.

Both hibiscus and cornflower are nice big dramatic flowers, so I figured they’d make a nice backdrop, and then I could curl my dragon around a pile of the more fiddly bits. The rosehips with the darker red made for a nice mid-sized feature between the big flowers and the tea pile - they also gave me a chance to insert a splash of green, which feels like it was a good decision, helping the red dragon stand out from the red backdrop!

Flowers & tea bits

Part of me still cries out for better definition around all the petals, but a) they’re in the background, they’re allowed to be a bit fuzzy, and b) with the hibiscus in particular, the petals don’t actually stand very clearly apart from each other, so this is fine!

The pile of tea was a bit of a challenge… there were meant to be some pale yellow chunks sticking out for the apple pieces, but I think I got carried away with adding the brown squiggles and went over them, oops!

Dragon details

With all the red things in the tea, I had to include plenty of red in the dragon. I opted for a fairly light blush tone down the back, with more of an orangey-brown tea tone for the belly and sides and darker reds for the details. I think I went a bit too far pushing to get a more saturated red on the wing joints… but the tail worked better. I brought the cornflower in again with the dorsal fringe, and of course the black tea with the dark stripes.

I initially added more red to the snout to get a bit more colour depth on the face… but it does also look a bit like this dragon has been enjoying some jam, which does rather fit the theme I suppose!

…and that’s that for the Tea & Toast dragon, I hope you liked it!

There’s a quick sneak peek at next month’s dragon, another tea blend, and my cat Jiji being her weird self below for those who want to show a little more support :)