The wonderful Liz Steel is starting a new teacup sketching course, and I decided to enrol to it. I don’t have many teacups, but I do love the ones that I have, and I think that they are interesting objects to sketch. As Liz points out, many teacups and coffee mugs have vivid memories tied to them, and they oftentimes have interesting shapes, colours and patterns. I was also looking for a way to kickstart my sketching again, and as this is a short course (just 4 weeks) I thought that this was a good place to start.

As is customary in Liz’s courses, I created a “pre course” sketch: a teacup sketch to demonstrate where I’m starting from. I started with a pencil sketch and then worked over it with a Staedtler pigment liner only to have the whole thing ruined when I used a new eraser that was too aggressive for the paper. You don’t often get to see failures on display, so I’m attaching the photo of my failed first attempt so that we can all learn from my mistake.

I then decided to risk going directly to watercolour. The teacup I sketched was both complex in terms of shape and pattern, so going this route was not something I would have chosen if not for my initial failure. The result came out better than I expected. It’s far from perfect but it’s not terrible. A start that I can improve upon, at the very least.

Here is my failure sketch. You can see the mess of the paper. But if you don’t experiment and try new things, you don’t know what works and what doesn’t. That eraser is relegated to non-watercolour paper from now on, and it was a lesson worth learning on a sketch of this kind and not on something more precious.

Don’t be afraid to try stuff out. It’s worth it even if the result isn’t what you’d term a success.