tea bag art

Don't remember where I first saw a tea bag used in collage but I remember thinking wow, there really is no end to the odd things you can use, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. Kinda like crazy quilting in that, if you can attach it to the piece, it's ok to use.

The image of the girl with the goofy hair is from a magazine. I'm not often drawn to using images of people I don't know in my art. I love art made with magazine people, I just don't much want to do it myself. However, this girl just grabbed me so she's been hanging around the art desk for months, getting shifted from one pile to another, occasionally disappearing for weeks at a time until she's turn up when I was digging for something else or company was coming and I was cleaning up.

What? Like you don't clean up the day before company? All I can say is thank god Julie and Moneka visit occasionally or no telling what state my house would be in.

Today I was cleaning up the kitchen counter and finally took a minute to open up the used tea bag that's been sitting there for a few days. Without thinking about it too hard, I sat down, squirted a blob of gel medium on the old phone book that serves as my disposable glue spreading area, and gelled the girl to a piece of cereal box that had been whitewashed with watered down gesso weeks ago.

Found the word Dream in my box of paper scraps, gelled it down, then put down the entire opened up tea bag. It looked just a bit plain so I stamped the lines a few times and called it done.

I love it! The random pattern, color, and texture of the tea bag give a grunginess that I really like. I hadn't used one in a while and had forgotten how cool they look with very little effort.