ISSUE 03
✦ THE MESSAGE ✦
Hello, it’s tea time again! ♡( ◡‿◡ )
My sincere apologies for delaying this issue. But I am here, and I am ready to share with you Issue 03 — The Haunted Tea House Herbarium! (I made it extra long this time to make up for it, so please make yourself some tea, and make yourself cozy).
Firstly, as always, an update on what is currently going on:
We have reached 500 email subscribers!
A friend is helping me to film some content for the THTH Instagram (like risoprinting and paper shopping) (thank you ♡(>ᴗ•)).
This has motivated me to work on reopening my online shop soon!
I have been evolving my risoprinting skills and creating some lovely artwork for you. Some bestselling oldies are also making their way back into the shop.
A new stamp and some stickers! Love a well-rounded upgrade.
A happy person with a bag full of beautiful paper from Takeo Paper Shop.
✦ FEATURED LOCATION ✦
For this issue, I decided to share some of my favourite places for art, printing and packaging supplies in Tokyo!
Firstly — TAKEO PAPER SHOP
To find the perfect paper for my new prints, I visited Takeo Paper Shop in Kanda. They have around 2,700 paper varieties from 300 brands!
I ended up buying 9 different papers to test for my risoprints. Now to see which one survives the risograph test…
Next — SHIMOJIMA ASAKUSABASHI
A giant packaging-supply wonderland hiding in Asakusabashi!
This 7-floor shop has basically everything: boxes, bags, wrapping materials, stickers, stationery and all sorts of things you suddenly decide you need.
And finally — TODO INSHO
My special little place for custom stamps!
The stamps are hand-carved by a third-generation craftsman, so each one is made individually and can take a few days depending on the order.
✦HERBARIUM ✦
Firstly, let’s talk about one of the OGs of the Haunted Tea House: the Obscuritea plant!
If you follow my story, you know that the tea and ink in this world are made from the Obscuritea plant.
It becomes Obscuritea when a special tea plant is inhabited by a Shadow Spirit. In turn, it gains special qualities.
However, a Shadow Spirit can inhabit many different plant species, and all of them can serve a purpose!
Below, I made a little exercise.
I tried to imagine what this haunting might actually look like. The changes must be subtle, as the inhabitants of this world barely notice them — just like us when we are surrounded by bugs. We only notice them if we pay attention.
So, if you look closely, what can you see?
Maybe some flowers have developed tiny horns, beady eyes, or extra growths. Maybe berries have appeared that would normally never belong to the plant itself.
Perhaps the plants have been haunted all along, and we simply never noticed.
THe GARDENS
For the main image of this issue, I chose to create a page that would belong to a herbarium book.
I started by opening Pinterest and quickly doodling some plant shapes I found interesting, just to have a starting point.
As you can see, some of them deviate quite a bit in the final version, but I feel like this is all I need to get my imagination running.
Particularly, I wanted to imagine the flowers that bear dragon embryos.
Because in this world, all dragons are born from flowers! But only from special kinds. Because of this, these flowers are prohibited from cultivation, and the gardens where they grow are in the possession of the ruling classes of the vampire and dragon kingdoms alike.
It is not known which individual flower will bear an embryo, but it is known which types of plants do!
They are collectively called dragon fruit, dragon flowers, and dragon berries.
In addition, I decided to haunt a couple more plants and use them as examples of what else could be made apart from Obscuritea!
Perhaps some haunted berry jam?
I can only wonder what kind of special qualities this jam might contain.
And what if the berries are collected from the flower that bore the dragon embryo?
Perhaps that further enhances the potency of the jam!
I can only imagine this selling like wine, where the jam would be kept on shelves for decades, with only one berry extracted for a very special occasion.
If you come up with any cool ideas, please let me know by replying to this email :).
THe FINAL
And to finalize the page, I added some paper texture and decided to further elaborate on the dragon flower by adding a set of twin dragons!
In the middle of the flower, there is an embryo containing two dragons curled up together. In the Haunted Tea House world, only five dragons can exist at the same time. For a new embryo to be born from a flower, one of the existing dragons must die.
So what happened here?
It seems that two dragons died at the same time and were reborn together. Perhaps their story was tragic. Perhaps it was a love story of some sort.
The embryos themselves are only shells, later infused with the soul of the person who carries them, granting them the ability to transform into the dragon.
Twin dragon embryos are unheard of, and whoever discovered these two would suddenly possess an incredible amount of power.
I wonder who found them first?
Thank you for reading!
See you in issue 04 - Yumi ♡( ◡‿◡ )
