Teacup 2010

Last year I blogged about helping John Walsh with some window design for Teacup on Thomas Street. Things went a bit quiet over Christmas but John asked Nia and I to start working on the window again. He wanted us to do a Valentine's Day themed window, drawings of detailed teacups interspersed with some subtle hearts to add a slight romantic twist. As the dots from the previous design were still all over the window we had quite an easy time getting them to fit to the grid by just rubbing out the dots and replacing them so it didn't take as long as the original and was a lot less stressful. The window looked really good, the detail on the cups made it look a bit more exciting than the plain dots and the individual designs on the cups captured the character and atmosphere of the inside of the cafe.

Nia took some photos, I forgot my camera, so here are a couple, the rest are on her blog.


HOWEVER disaster struck over the weekend and when Nia and I returned to Teacup today the cup illustrations were all gone! We were pretty shocked as we'd intended to add some finishing touches to the window and we really didn't expect to see it completely clean however we were informed that the condensation had gone wild and all of the paint had run.

We felt pretty deflated after this but John said to try and do a simpler design so that there would still be a Valentines window. The prospect of creating a new grid was a bit too much for us so we decided to go for a more sporadic format with the positioning of the illustrations, focused mainly around the logo. We stuck to simple outlines of cups, cakes and hearts. The window just isn't as effective as the original detailed design but it would be a waste of time to attempt it again. I think the best idea would be to return to the outlines once they are completely dry and add detail then.