Painting with Tea

We started off painting with tea and tea bags, and then painted with the tea leaves.  It was fun and smelled wonderful!

You need:

• different types of tea {I bought blueberry, raspberry, and orange -- thinking those would produce slightly different colors.  However, I think that because I bought green tea, they all basically looked the same.  You might try infusions in black tea to see if that produces variations in color.}
• mugs for letting tea steep
• containers for tea "paints"
• paintbrushes
• glue {not pictured...this was a last minute idea!}

I put 2 teabags of the same kind in a mug.  Boil water and fill each mug about halfway.  Let steep and cool. {We don't want any little fingers to get burned!!}

You can see that even after 20 minutes, there was very little difference in color.  The orange had the most color, but they were all an orangish-yellow color.

Not to be discouraged...we set off painting.  GM(2.5) really enjoyed it and painted for quite a while.  The teas smelled wonderful which added a great sensory element to the experience.

After he got bored of painting with the paintbrush, we experimented painting with the tea bags.  This made quite a mess because he kept dipping the tea bag in the little container of tea -- but he was having fun, so I went with it. 

After he had soaked the paper with the teabags, I decided to mix up some tea leaves in watered down glue.  This was similar to our method for painting with spices.  I squeezed some Elmer's glue in one of the plastic cups and stirred in a small amount of water.  Then I tore open one of the tea bags and squeezed out the wet tea leaves.  

TJ (4.5) wasn't interested in painting with tea at first, but he decided it would be fun if his digger helped :) 

This is GM's painting with tea and tea bags.

And here is the painting with tea leaves.


I hope you have fun trying this activity!  The orange jasmine tea made my kitchen smell wonderful for hours :)  I was inspired by this post. 

Let me know how your paintings turn out!


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