-I'm really excited to see you.

Today, I'm thinking about art materials.

I love art materials.

I love colored pencils.

I love markers.

I love other markers.

I love pencil sharpeners.

I love pencils.

I love erasers.

I love paint.

I love anything you can use to make a work of art.

Whenever I open up my bag full of materials, well, it feels like a party.

I want to try something that I've never tried before.

I want to make a work of art using some very unusual materials.

Come to my drawing board.

Let me show you what I mean.

Come on.

So I have these beautiful roses in my home, and I was thinking, what if I were to use these roses as an unusual drawing material?

So here's my idea.

I'm going to draw a picture of one of the roses while using another rose as my drawing tool.

I'm going to use the bottom part, the stem as my drawing tool.

I'm going to dip it into black paint and draw what I see.

So I'm drawing the leaves at the bottom of the the rose petals first and drawing the stem.

I'm noticing right away that I have to keep dipping the rose stem into the paint.

It doesn't hold a lot of paint, so I have to keep returning to my paint and dipping it in, but it makes these beautiful marks.

They go from dark to light.

There's a little bit of texture to them, and I can actually make some of the marks thin and some of the marks thick.

I'm looking closely at the shape of the petals and just moving my drawing tool around to try to capture the shapes that I see in the rose.

It actually allows me to do a little bit of shading.

I can get some paint on the end of the rose stem and just drag it across the paper, and I get some dark marks.

Really nice way to shade and get texture.

I love the mark-making and the way it looks.

Now, here's my next idea.

I want to add some color, so I was thinking, well, what else could I use for color that would be unexpected?

And I came up with the idea of painting with tea.

I have this lemon flavored tea, and even though it's lemon, it actually makes this beautiful, pinkish-reddish color in my cup.

So here I am.

I'm going to paint this rose that I drew with a rose and I'm going to paint it with tea.

I'm adding some layers of the lemon-flavored tea onto my drawing and noticing that it's very light, so I need to add 2 or 3 layers to build up the darks and lights in the rose, but it's actually quite lovely.

It's a really beautiful color that I'm getting from the tea.

I want to add some green too, and I want to keep this theme of using unexpected materials going.

So here's my next idea.

I'm coloring onto my drawing using the actual leaves from the rose.

If I push down into the paper with the leaf, it leaves some of the green pigment onto the paper.

So now I have this finished drawing of a rose that I created with a rose.

I colored it with tea and the color that came off of the actual rose leaves.

This was such a fun experiment in drawing with unexpected materials.

I've never drawn with a rose stem before, and painting with the tea actually felt a lot like painting with watercolor.

In the end, I have a really nice drawing and had a great experience.

Creating this image of the rose has reminded me of one of my favorite drawings from the Guggenheim Museum, this drawing of a flower.

It's a chrysanthemum, and I keep thinking, "Wow, there are so many different ways to make drawings."

You could use charcoal or traditional materials like this drawing or ink and a rose stem like the one that we used.

My challenge for you this week is, you guessed it, make a work of art using an unexpected drawing material.

You can use the end of a flower like I did, or maybe you could use a stick, or you could take a sponge and dip it into paint and make some marks.

Or you could even use your fingers.

Just make sure you clean up afterwards.

It was so much fun to make a drawing with a flower.