We both love our gardens and find plants are a constant source of inspiration. With all that colour and shape right outside the back door they are a brilliant source to work with in your drawing and painting. I often use plants in my sketchbooks and altered books drawing them or using watercolour to record my favourites.

In another workshop I demonstrated another method for using plant materials in your sketchbook as collage elements. In that video workshop I worked into an altered book, but it struck me how these two workshops could work together beautifully. The plant printed pages making the perfect backdrop for the collage and drawing I was doing.

Recently I used the actual plants in two different ways. First I used plant material that I’d collected in the garden to make contact prints on paper. This is sometimes called eco-printing. It’s a fascinating and quite compulsive process. You bundle real leaves and petals with paper and boil, the plant materials colouring the paper and leaving imprints. With my plant printed papers we made small books which could be an end in themselves, but you know us, we don’t know when to stop!

Here you can see some of the resulting pages I’ve made exploring that combination. We always love layering processes and techniques and I think this is a great example of how you can work with relatively simple steps to produce something full of interest.

Maybe you have tried plant printing before and are wondering what you can do with the papers. Hopefully this will give you some ideas. You can find links to both workshops below.

Thanks for reading today, bye for now!

Linda