2018 Make Art that Sells Boot Camp assignment. This is my February assignment for Make Art that Sells Boot Camp. The bootcamp this month asked us to illustrate anything related to tea, which is something I really love. If you follow my work you will know I love illustrating anything related to food and drink and one of my favourite drinks is tea. Every day I start my day with a cup of coffee but after that I drink both Chinese and milk teas. They are an essential part of my day.

I’m from Taiwan and my country is a tea country. We have all kinds of drinks based on tea, whether it be a green tea or black tea. We have high mountain teas that taste absolutely divine and we also have cold drinks made with tea including bubble tea and different kinds of fruit and flower teas. Sadly I find a lot of Chinese teas available for sale in Edinburgh really weak. My family posts me tea from Taiwan but recently I ran out so rather than bother my family I went to a local tea shop and the teas tasted nice but again too weak. Thankfully my friend posted me a load of really nice Taiwanese tea.

For this project I started off with my main assignment. I’m always quite busy at the beginning of the month and my schedule is always packed with new jobs. I decided to go for something a bit quirky and kooky. I really like the makeup bag I illustrated from the last assignment so I illustrated all my cups and tea pots in a similar style. Another thing I illustrated for this assignment is “fortune cookies”. We don’t really do fortune cookies in Taiwan but it’s a snack both my daughter and I really like them. They’re fun to open and taste great. The official assignment was to design a journal cover with the theme of “tea leaves reading”. So I based my assignment around the phrase “Good Fortune”. I also used some symbols associated with “good luck” from different cultures to decorate my tea cups, tea pots and also the cover. Examples of these symbols are a lady bug, four-leaf clover, butterfly and acorns.

For the colours, I tried to use a limited colour palette for my project. My last assignment had a peachy pink background colour so for this assignment I used a cobalt blue to offer some colour diversity and contrast in my portfolio. I love to play with different colour combinations which is really fun!

I also used my fortune cookies illustration to design an enamel mug as you can see below. I made a real product with this design. If you have interested in this cute happy mug you can have a look of my Easy shop. 

I hope you like my journal cover and enamel mug design. What’s your favourite tea? Always love to hear from you!