Today's Throwback Thursday post from 2016 is all about teacups and coffee mugs. Share your favourite coffee mug quotes in the comment box below. What does your coffee mug reveal about your personality?
Picture you, upon my knee,
Just tea for two, and two for tea.
~Irving Caesar
This rhyming couplet is certainly very old-fashioned. Picture you upon my knee? Drinking tea upon my knee? Isn't that an accident and lawsuit waiting to happen?
What about political correctness? Who would be sitting on that knee exactly? The lyrics once had a charming, romantic connotation, you know, young innocent love and all, but these days of internet voyeurs and bare all, tell all stories, it's more than likely to be a very creepy image that comes to mind.
Tea just doesn't pack sufficient punch for me.
I NEED my coffee in the morning and the sooner the better! If I had to write lyrics for coffee, it would definitely be some kind of rock and roll rendition sung by none other than Jon Bon Jovi himself. Ohhhh.....can you see Jon and his beautiful eyes as he belts out the first few lines...."hot! hot! hot! That's how I like my coffee and my women...." Now THAT is my kind of morning!
Coffee mug messages
Coffee mugs however, aren't nearly as pretty and delicate as teacups. Just the word mug itself sounds very clunky and uncouth.
Think about all those messages people carry around on their coffee mugs.
"I DON'T LIKE MORNING PEOPLE. OR MORNINGS. OR PEOPLE." Does this elicit a laugh or do people run away from you?
"NO TALKIE BEFORE COFFEE." Huh! Apparently you regress to baby talk before coffee. It's not pretty.
Or how about this one?
"BITCHES BE CRAY CRAY FOR COFFEE?" Baby talk, bad grammar, and a demeaning statement towards women proudly displayed on one quick, memorable, rhetorical question. It may, in fact, say more about you than you want to reveal on a coffee mug.
This next one would make me want to punch you first thing in the morning......
..."A GREAT ATTITUDE BECOMES A GREAT MOOD, WHICH BECOMES A GREAT DAY, WHICH BECOMES A GREAT YEAR, WHICH BECOMES A GREAT LIFE."
REALLY? You want to taunt me with that one at 7 am? You are risking life and limb!
Teacups remind us of gentler times
Please, give me a beautiful flowery teacup any day. No crude sayings, no crass messages.
Teacups hark back another era when people at least pretended to be prim and proper in public, and followed Emily Post's advice on etiquette. No more slurping out of big coffee mugs.
I received a lovely sampling of teacups after my request in an earlier blog post. I have drawn two of the several teacups I have received so far, both of them from a subscriber in Australia. She writes that the above tea bowl belongs to her husband.
The tea bowl's origins can be traced back to the Middle East, and of course to China, where it is still used today. I should have made the bottom wider as it was shown in the photo the reader sent me, but I am quite pleased with the flowers.
Next, I added a background by importing the watercolour sketch into Procreate, a painting and sketching app for apple mobile devices. Procreate is one of the best investments I have made in purchased applications. I keep telling myself that I should spend more time with this app. I have only scratched the surface by using the app for backgrounds. I did this in an earlier post when I added a background to a vintage Chevrolet truck I had painted in my sketchbook.
Experimenting with apps
There are wonderful, easy to use apps for art available online sometimes for free, sometimes for a pittance, and I have fun just uploading art through the different apps and experimenting to see what will happen. Nothing is permanent. One click of the undo button and voilà...the atrocity disappears.
The second cup above belonged to the same reader's mother. I love the bouquet of delicate pink flowers all gathered together with a gold ribbon. The gold rim adds a touch of class doesn't it?
I would love to feature more teacups.
Search through your cupboards and send me those lovely (or chipped and cracked) treasured teacups. Even the flawed ones are beautiful.
Forward your photos to me at louiseprimeau@gmail.com. The file should be between 300k and 3mb in order to give me the best resolution for drawing the teacup.
Thank you Louise, you did a good job and I like the added touch of the Lipton’s tea bag. Like you I like playing around with the art apps, any form of art gives pleasure. ????
Yes Sally, art is pleasurable and therapeutic as well. Thanks for the photos. I will draw the other teacups at a later date.