Matcha I’d like to Feature
Blended Black Cacao
One of first pictures I made while sitting around in my old tea shop. The original pencil image hangs on the wall in my bedroom.
This image exists because of this bowl, a big bag of roasted tencha tea, an anime figure I saw of a girl sitting in a cocktail glass, Calgary’s hot chocolate festival, and the Internets degenerate culture.
My granite matcha mill was essentially brand new at this point, and was excitedly grinding roasted tencha because I had just purchased a huge bag of it (1kg of tencha is a LOT for me). I was just playing around to see if roasted matcha itself is a drinkable drink. It is, but from what I’ve experienced so far, it’s not something I’d ever crave or excitedly recommend to people. “Black Matcha. Kinda cool, I wonder if there’s anything there…” Calgary’s February hot chocolate festival was a few months away, I was considering entering. I was working on a classic hot chocolate recipe at the time. Frankly I really liked the recipe I had, I thought it would do very well. It’s all just quality ingredients, and logic, but I digress — I had very good quality cacao in my shop and had a ‘what if’ moment.
The pulverized roasted tencha + good cacao was very better without sugar, but with sugar… ! There’s something here! But how would I serve it? Well its a very intense flavor, I should serve it like matcha I thought. “Oh, I have a bowl perfect for this!”
So I experimented a lot with this “Black Matcha”, but hand grinding the tea for it is incredibly time consuming, thus expensive as hell for any guests. My shop was almost always empty, the music was all over the place. I was definitely listening to this song at the time, because I had just got into Run the Jewels and had it on repeat all day.
Surely I recently saw an anime figure of a girl in a martini glass and thought to buy it, but then I thought it would be even better for them to be in a bowl. So I took some reference photos of my bowl, fired up my 3d posing tool, put my character Ovna in a relaxed, bath-like pose, and got to sketching.
I don’t know in what order MILF and BBC came into the equation, but as soon as they did — a lot of finer details came into the image, and everything wrapped up. Queen of Spades, as you may know, is internet lingo for a woman who prefers black men. This kick started the Queen Cards art, that the Queen of Clubs will eventually be posed on this site.
While the original pencil sketch is very dear to me, I was too scared to touch it with a fine liner, especially around the lips and eyes. I felt that if I screwed up a line I’d really regret it, so it sat as a dull pencil sketch until I could bring it into a digital life in winter 2024. If you’d like to see the original image, here’s an instagram post from a while ago
