How to Make Tea

I made this to show people how to make tea, and I also wanted to do something fun on the tea side of the Darjeeling Café. Even though we're concentrating a lot of our efforts on wine, trying to turn our restaurant into the wine destination of Central Virginia, we don't want to forget where we came from. After all, this whole thing started with tea.

We're much more like a European tea room than anything else: come in for some tea, stay for lunch, hang out with friends, before you know it, it's time to enjoy a great beer or wine, then it's dinner time. That's how I lived when I was in Europe (not every day of course, but often), and I think that luxury is missing in people's lives here in the USA.

Elephant on Stress in America

If you click the image, you'll probably be able to read the speech balloons.
I thought this little comic was funny. At the Darjeeling Café, our mascot is an elephant, and we want to put a little magazine together that extends the Darjeeling Café's brand and message of well-being and thriving lifestyle, and that would include a comic from time to time with an anthropomorphic elephant. We are constantly worried about people thinking that it's a republican thing, but I've resigned myself to it. Artists' work is often misunderstood because it does not really belong to the artist once it is thrust out into the world.

Anyway. It's anti-circus and animal violence and pro therapy. I hope you like it.

Tea Maze

I think it's better to start this Tea Cup Maze at the handle so that you're going left to right, unless you're left-handed, and you can solve this moving right to left. That's what I was thinking about when I did this. I also thought maybe you could have a tea at my wife's tea shop when it opens back up after a year-long expansion and find this on your table and solve it while you drink. Wouldn't that be a nice way to spend a few minutes? This should take less than 60 seconds to solve, so you could finish it while you waited for your tea to steep or while you waited for it to cool down to the temperature you prefer.

Anyway, this is another maze I did. It's part of the book I've been working on. I hope that you click on it, get the bigger size, and print it out and solve it. If you have fun doing those things, please let me know.

The Murder Bros. Halloween Show

I made this poster for the Murder Bros. show this weekend. It took a long time, but I'm in love with the way it turned out. I'm extremely excited about this show. The Smell of Death will also be playing.

She's supposed to be a ghost getting ready to party.

Flying Elephant in BW

I needed an image to break up some text in a menu for Darjeeling Cafe, so I grabbed this from a poster I did for a poetry series at Pegasus Books in Berkeley. I reduced it to grayscale one piece at a time. I hate the way programs want to do it for you. It's never right. I really like the way it turned out, and I thought I'd stick it up here while I was posting Darjeeling stuff.

Darjeeling Cafe: Elephant in a Teacup

This is a little thing I did for Darjeeling Cafe in Staunton. It will appear on Tshirts and on small things like postcards and those little stickers that go on people's loose leaf teas. I think it's pretty awesome because it's very abstract and still quite clear what it is. In one color!

I enjoy limiting things to one color. In fact, a lot of times, small illustrations I do in many colors don't make it onto this blog because I'm not as proud of them. They're good and everything, but working with every color in the rainbow feels like cheating sometimes. It feels easy.

Darjeeling QR

So it's CMYK, which might look lame on the monitor since I didn't convert properly. I just wanted to get it up before I got it printed and in the window of the new location of the Darjeeling Café. If only one person knows what the hell a QR code is, this will be worth it. I worked a long time on it.