Botanical Ink & Paint Making Online Course
An introduction to four techniques for making inks and paints
Soda ash inks, evaporated inks, extract inks, and lake pigments. Identifying reliable and effective plants for pigment. How to use binders, preservatives, and additives. Working with metals, acids, and alkalis as to fix and transform colours on the paper.
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Getting Started
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Welcome
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Equipment & Suppliers
A list of the things you need to get started and where you can source them from.
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Studio Practice & Safety
How to practice good studio safety.
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What Is A Paint Or Ink Made From?
What actually is paint and ink? What are the ingredients that make them and what are the functions of those ingredients?
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Downloadable PDFs
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Plants
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Growing Plants For Inks & Paints
You can grow many plants for ink and paint making. Here is a guide of what plants will give you the best colours.
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Plants For Inks & Paints
A guide to plants for ink and paint making. Suppliers & Recommended processes.
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Gardening Equipment
Some tools for growing plants for colour.
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Permaculture Approach To Growing Dye Plants
A presentation on ecological approaches to growing plants for colour
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Preparing Ground
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Processes
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Extracting Colour From Plants
How to get extract colour from plants effectively.
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Lake Pigment Making
How to precipitate a dye in to a pigment.
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Evaporated Ink Making
This is a good technique for turning an old dye bath, of a woody plant in to an ink.
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Soda Ash Inks
A quick method involving hot water and soda ash
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Working With Powdered Extracts
A quick way of making inks using dye extracts. These will give a variety of vibrant colours with very little work.
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Metals & pH shifters
Fix and modify your inks and paints with metals and pH shifters to achieve a wider variety of colours.
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Further Learning
More Info On the Course
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You can work with many plants available to you, including garden plants, wild plants, food waste, and specialist dye plants you can either grow or purchase.
There are many common plants that may be growing all around you that you can work with to make inks and dyes.
These processes can bring you closer to the natural world, looking more closely to identify plants, harvesting, and working with the seasons.
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From very quick and simple methods, through to more technical processes, such as making lake pigments. Including, evaporated inks, soda ash inks, lake pigments, and extract inks.
By sharing generic approaches, the recipes enable you to work with hundreds of different plants. Identifying reliable and effective plants. How to use binders, preservatives, and additives. Working with metals, acids, and alkalis as to fix and transform colours on the paper. Working with materials you can buy or make from found materials.
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90 minutes of pre-recorded video demonstrations and learning resources will take you through the processes step by step. Plus a 2 hour Q&A video.
The techniques can open up days, weeks, or months of experimenting and refining.
I used to run this class as a very full in-person one day workshop or a more leisurely two day workshop. It would take 2-3 days by yourself to thoroughly have a go at all the techniques.
How This Course Works:
You will immediately get access to the learning resources. You can access this indefinitely so you can go about the course at your own pace. Watch the pre-recorded video tutorials and read through the learning resources including recipes, plant lists, equipment list & reading list. Gather the equipment and materials you would like to try out. Have a go! Try out some ink and paint making processes, make some drawings and sample cards. Test the effects of modifiers and fixatives on the different inks and paints.
I have had people all around the world including Australia, Argentina, Iceland, the US, Canada, India, and Europe join this course. My specialism is in the wild plants where I live in the UK, and dye plants I can grow here. However I teach generic recipes that you can use to explore the plants where you live.
Access to materials:
The recipes can be used with locally available plants and materials, such as food waste, common wild plants, household ingredients, and scrap metal. There will also be recipes that will call for specialist plants you would have to grow or order from a supplier. Old rusty nails, or pieces of copper pipe or wire, salt and vinegar are useful for making fixatives and modifiers. They are not essential but will expand your colour spectrum. There are a variety of binders you can use, some can be commonly found in the kitchen, while others are more specialist and would need to be ordered online. Household ingredients such as vinegar, salt, bicarbonate of soda, honey, eggs, and lemon juice are useful. I send out an equipment list with links to more specialist materials you can buy online. Some of the recipes require nothing but the plants that are growing around you, other recipes require specialist ingredients that are available to buy online. materials.
Not sure if it’s right for you?
Ask Flora a question at flora @ plantsandcolour.co.uk or use this question box: