After spending most of our first day in Bourton-on-the-Water outside in the wind and cold, it was a relief to retreat to a cozy tea room in the late afternoon and settle in for tea and scones.
Our friendly waitress chatted with us about where we were from and why we were visiting Bourton and then asked with a smile, “Which way do you take your scones? Clotted cream on the top and jam on the bottom, or cream on the bottom and jam on the top?” (If you’re wondering what clotted cream is, check out a recipe for it here.)
It seems there’s an ongoing debate among scone aficionados about which way works best, so I tried mine both ways….
and decided I’m definitely partial to clotted cream on the bottom and jam on top. It’s almost impossible to spread ooey-gooey clotted cream over top of slippery strawberry jam – it works so much better to lay down a base of cream first!
I decided this hotly debated topic would make a great page in my Cotswold journal, so I snapped a picture of my tea and scones and sketched them later that day. The Rodda’s clotted cream label helped me plan the color scheme for the page – don’t you love how the turquoise and red look together?
I used Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna in varying concentrations to paint the scones. The strawberry jam was done with Quinacridone Magenta and Permanent Rose with a touch of Ultramarine Blue added to darken the value in the shadow areas.
The clotted cream was more challenging to paint. Yellow Ochre with the tiniest touch of Cadmium Yellow gave me a fairly close match to the creamy color of the real thing.
I glued the label from the Rodda’s Clotted Cream onto my page…
and did a sketch of the tea bag label in the lower right corner. A white gel pen was used for the “Rose Hip & Cherry” lettering.
I selected a jaunty lettering style and transferred it to the page (see 3 Easy Ways to Transfer Lettering to a Sketchbook Page) then painted it with watercolor using a size 0 round brush.
I like being able to coordinate the colors of lettering to other elements on the page, and using watercolor instead of felt-tip pens means I can get an exact match every time.
When I was painting the jam, I left some white paper unpainted to indicate highlights, but decided, in the end, that I needed a few more highlights, so I added them using a Signo Uni-ball Gel Pen.
When I look at this page, it brings back good memories of that happy afternoon at the cozy little cafe in Bourton. The friendly waitress, who took an extra minute or two to make conversation with us, sparked an idea that led to this page in my travel journal.
Sharing the experience with friends made it all the sweeter.
