Artist Uses Dried Tea Bags as Her Canvas

Ruby Silvious gained international recognition thanks to her tea bag art – miniature paintings and collages adorning used tea bags. The idea first came to her in 2015, after using an emptied-out tea bag as her canvas. She’s since launched a 363 Days of Tea project – a visual daily record of her impressions of the moment, painted on tea bags.

“I opened an Instagram account and said, ‘Let’s just see,’” she recalled in an interview with Hudson Valley One. “I knew I wanted to do a tea-themed project, but just couldn’t decide how to do it. On the third day of the year, I was sitting in a coffee shop in New York City, so I posted a picture of my cup of tea and whatever I was eating. That was ‘Day One,’ and it took off from there: I got ten ‘likes’ the first day and I was ecstatic. ‘Wow! I was really not expecting an audience.’”

Her audience has grown immensely since, and with almost 20k followers on Instagram to date, she’s a force to be reckoned with. “My goal when I first started this project was to see if I had the discipline to actually paint something every day,” she says, admitting that “it’s challenging.”

In order to prepare her makeshift canvases, each bag is emptied of its contents and dried on a paper towel. Some bags are opened and laid flat, while others are emptied without changing the original shape of the bag. The finishes product never ceases to amaze. Take a look for yourself:

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Have a cup or two. Or six.

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Summer countdown

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