Tea With Lemon by Thea Cable

Love it Thea! Totally different from my teapot painting as you've said, very delicately and skilfully painted and the contrasting colour of the lemon is just right.

Relaxed, colourful, and just the right amount of splodgyness about it. Informal and well painted Thea.

Love the lemon yellow against that pink. A nice relaxed feel about this one! The light on the side of the tea pot looks good and I like the rich colour mix of pink and blue under the pot. I imagine that when applying watercolour like this that you need to be pretty careful exactly where you place the paint and yet you've still managed to achieve the spontaneous, less accurate feel that you wanted. Well done from me!!

Thank you very much Christine, Fiona and Louise - lovely comments and really appreciate the feedback. As for the colours under the pot, I would like to tell you that they are meticulously planned, but I'm afraid not. I put a colour down and if it doesn't have that zing I want, I drop another colour in, and so on. I just keep doing, flying by the seat of my pants, until it looks right in my eyes. I just have to be careful that I hardly touch the paint I am dropping extra colours into so that I don't stir things up and risk muddying the washes.

Lovely delicate washes suit the subject very well, your characteristic style shines through.

Lovely painting Thea

Beautiful watercolour Thea, love your style

Thank you very much Stephen, Glennis and Petra for your kind comments. I do wish I had been a bit bolder and less prescriptive - but perhaps next time....?

Another lovely painting. Looking forward to the plate of cakes to go with it!

I like this a lot Thea and I know what you mean by wobbly. It is difficult to pull off an informal/imperfect drawing if your life 's work has been perfecting them. That said I like the washes and the discriminate splashes of paint a la Charles Reid. very well done.

Thank you very much Julie and Philip for your nice comments. Mmmm - the cakes might come next - who knows! Philip, I think you have hit the nail on the head - you do spend time improving your drawing skills, or at least I have had to as I am not a naturally good draughtswoman, and then I ask my brain to forget all that and get the perspective skewed and the lines wobbly. Now you put it like that - I can see why I had some difficulty.

If you couldn't draw then you couldn't paint like this Thea. Drawing is the most important skill. It's not just about wobbly lines, wrong perspective and spontaneity. We need to be able to draw and look properly in the first place. That's what I think anyway!

Superb Thea. I like the unusual combination of a lemon with a teapot, I think it works very well colour wise and gives this composition another dimension. I also love the little bits of very colourful splattering that you are doing in the background mixed with the very light washes. There is one criticism that I have to make - I think when you photograph your works it might be good to do them in natural light outside as your whites look slightly dark. I have great difficulty photographing watercolours so I purchased a photographers natural light lamp which works brilliantly when shone on the painting from an angle, or you could try photographing them outside? I think if you did the colours would come through a lot better? Fantastic painting - could be even more sparkling with better lighting - just a thought?

Thank you very much Joseph for your compliments and also for the advice. I did actually photograph this one outside lying on the deck outside my studio. It was very bright this morning but the painting wasn't in the direct sun. I find photographing outside tricky as the light varies throughout the day from a very cold blue light to a softer more mellow light in the late afternoon. I took this photo about 10.30 a.m. - hence the blue tinge to the paper. I have a daylight standard lamp and also a daylight desk lamp in my studio and I do use both to photograph paintings because, as you say, they can produce a nice bright image. However, I find it very much depends on what colours you have used in a painting and also how much white paper there is left. The camera seems to struggles with white and often produces it looking grey or blue. After photographing an image, I then brighten it in Photoshop to try to regain the natural white of the paper, but this seems to be a bit hit and miss. With some paintings it does the trick and with others (i.e. this one) it doesn't work as well - probably down to the colours again I think. It is a perennial problem that irritates the life out of me as I want to try and reproduce what I see in front of me in the original. I use a very white paper because I like the contrast with the colours I use and it is so disappointing when I can't photograph a painting and keep this whiteness. I will crack this problem, but haven't quite hit on the winning formula yet. I'll photograph it again using my daylight bulbs, as you suggest, and see if that is any improvement. I'll let you know!

Louise - it is funny but I actually have drawn since I was a child, but only started painting about five and a half years ago. When I started painting, my drawing seemed to go to pot for some reason and it is only lately that I have begun to regain some of the skills I had, I totally agree that drawing is at the basis of every decent painting and if you then want to start playing around with wobbly lines and skewed perspectives, then you have to know how to do it properly in the first place. It is a bit like Les Dawson playing the piano - do you remember when he used to play all the wrong notes - very funny it was too. Well, he wouldn't have been able to do that if he hadn't been an excellent pianist in the first place. It is the same sort of thing.

Love it! Earl grey with lemon in nice bone china, can't beat it :) That lemon really zings Thea.

Another super composition Thea. Particularly like the play between the two handles, with the lemon as horizontal element. And the colours are enchanting.

But paintings do have a life of their own Thea, that's what it's all about. Love the contrast between yours and Christine's. .

Your style is delightful, Thea, and it works beautifully here. There's a certain wobbliness about it that lends just the right artistic touch without detracting from the specific shapes of the teapot and the cup, so I think you've got it spot on!

Paintings and drawings do indeed have a life of their own - but I suspect we'd get bored if every painting we produced came out exactly as we'd imagined or intended it: we'd be a bit like a laser printer - press the button, out comes the print. I like this one, anyway, and it makes me look forward to my afternoon tea.

As I don't think anyone has said it before me, you'll forgive me if I say - just my cup of tea! Well someone had too, didn't they? Well done and I love the contrast between you and Christine's cuppas!

Thank you so much Helen, Val, Sharon, Sylvia, Seok, Robert and Debs for your encouraging feedback - so much appreciated and valued. Robert, mine never come out as I see them in my head. It is frustrating but, as you say, it is part of art and after all, we aren't making photocopies.