What do you see in the tea blot?

Photo from Austin Kleon

“Tea is for when I want to smoothly sail through the day. Coffee is for when I want to hack through the jungle.”

Love that. So says Austin Kleon, a Texas-based artist who creates a whole line of "tea bag drawings." He wakes up, has a cup of tea — when he fells like sailing, that is, instead of hacking — then pulls the tea bag from his cup and drops it onto a fresh white index card. The resulting Rorschach-like stains stimulate his imagination — he titles them, as if he's finding shapes and creatures in the cloud formations, and calls them art. "You could show the tea stain to 100 different people, and they’d see 100 different images," he says in this interview. Often he even uses the blob of brown as the starter dough for a drawing — blob as island, blob as dancing fat kid, blob as ferocious monster, etc., like so ...

Photo from Austin Kleon

... or as the basis for an entire cartoon, like the image above (my favorite, very teaku-like), or this one:

Photo from Austin Kleon

See a full array of tea-bag doodles here on Kleon's blog. Enjoy them with a steamy cup of that's cool.