My teacup sketches are generally serious direct watercolour paintings but from time to time I love doing quick fun loose versions.

This is particularly the case when…

1. I have a new-ish cup with a crazy complex but beautiful pattern!

A loose sketch is a great way to get to know the pattern and to work out how to interpret it.

2. I’m drinking from three different cups in one sitting.

This is not my usual practice at all but on this occasion, I wanted to sketch these three cups and didn’t have a lot of time. As I prefer to sketch a cup while I’m drinking from it and my solution was to sketch them all while drinking from the one pot of tea. So I poured tea into the first cup, did a sketch, then poured again into the next teacup and sketched it, and then did the same for the third cup.

I did one sketch after the other in about 15 minutes – a bit wild but so much fun!

These three cups (and teapot) are ones that I don’t particularly like and I wrote the reasons why on the page. But of course, now that I’ve done this  I feel attached to them!

Even though these sketches were done quickly with an attitude of ’embracing the wonkiness’ there are some parts of delightful watercolour magic. So it was a good reminder to myself that I don’t always have to take my teacup sketch seriously! It’s good to have fun and take risks at time.

Here are close-ups of these pages.

Ah! Teacups are such a fun subject to sketch and so I’m super happy to be going through my Teacups course with a cohort. Find out more about the Teacups Live Version here.