Brenda Delgado, a self-taught artist from Manila, in the Philippines, paints dead cockroaches into miniature artworks inspired by classics like Starry Night or Girl With a Pearl Earring.

When it comes to unusual art mediums, it’s tough to find something more bizarre than Brenda Delgado’s choice for a canvas. The 30-year-old resident of Caloocan City in Manila came up with the idea to paint on dead cockroaches while sweeping some dead bugs from her working space. She noticed how shiny and smooth cockroach wings were, paused, and somehow thought about painting on them. She started using oil paints to recreate tiny versions of classic masterpieces like Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, and her works soon started attracting attention online.

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We’ve seen artists use all sorts of canvases in the past, from paper towels, to butterfly wings or fallen leaves, but never their own carpets. Well, thank to the genius of Japanese Twitter user @agito0219, we can now add carpets to the list of unusual things to create exceptional art on.

@agito0219’s art is as simple as it is impressive. If you’ve ever vacuumed a carpet, you probably already know they usually have two sides. Brush the fibers one way and you reveal one side, but brush them again against the grain and you can see patterns of a slightly or completely different color, depending on the rug. It’s this double-sided nature of her carpets that the mysterious @agito0219 exploits to create her intricate yet ephemeral works of art.

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Hair is not the easiest art medium to work with, especially when you’re trying to create detailed portraits of people and animals, but young Indian artist Midhun R.R. had developed a technique that allows him to manipulate thousands of short hair strands into impressive artworks.

All Midhun needs to create his art is some hair, obviously, a white sheet of paper for canvas and a long needle to manipulate the tiny hairs. He makes the whole thing look easy in the time lapse videos he posts on YouTube, but admits that arranging the hairs the way he wants is actually harder than it seems. To make it easier for himself he has the hair chemically treated before using it. The hair strands are then cut at various lengths, depending on the image he is trying to create, and carefully arranged on the paper canvas using the needle. Once Midhun is satisfied with the result, the artwork is sandwiched between two glass panes for long-term preservation.

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