We don’t want to be seen to be encouraging drinking, of course, but we have observed that it’s a popular source of inspiration for a wide variety of Xara artists.  So here’s our pick of six great images from five different artists, starting with a good old cup of tea! Derek Cooper ‘The cup that cheers’ was posted by Derek (Masque) on TalkGraphics, if you follow the thread here you’ll be able to take your pick of 5 different versions of this image, depending how much milk you like in your tea, or whether you take yours with snail (this is not a strange French innovation, for a partial explanation I point you to a couple of Derek’s many snail images here and here). There’s another great cup of tea in the Examples folder in Xara Xtreme/Xtreme Pro (Designs Gallery > Examples 2, Tea Break) by Paul Shotan, whose work we have inexplicably not featured in Inspirational Art.  Both English artists, I wonder if that’s a co-incidence... Page created with Xara Xtreme 5 Valery Kouleshov Next we have picked two images by Valery Kouleshov, Beer and Light in Grass, featured in his Gallery on graphics.com  Newton Florentino If you admired the water droplets on the Beer and the Light in the Grass then you should love this combination from Newton Florentino, another one of the 30+ Xara artists on graphics.com. His collection includes this Splash. Mohamed Elhlaly (Black Panther on TalkGraphics) We have added a collection of Mohamed’s work to the Xara Gallery this month but it didn’t include this great image which was displayed in TalkGraphics, you can follow the thread here.    Luca Pennisi Lupen posted ‘Late Cocktail’ on TalkGraphics “I enjoy still life, especially with liquids and glasses and this is a quite photorealistic one”. There was some alarm about the possible mix of the cocktail, but universal admiration for the photorealistic rendering.