Yesterday, March 15, was our Plant Printing Workshop. It was a full 4 hour class hosted by Eric Hochberg, co-founder of the Nature Printing Society, and located right in front of the Hiromi Paper store. The class started off with an introduction of the HPI helpers; myself (Yona), Sachi, and our newest addition, Jerry. Then, Eric began with a brief background on nature printing and it’s ties with biology and medicinal purposes. He went on to demonstrate printing leaves on newsprint and the class was off to do their first prints.
After the first round, Eric demonstrated the more complicated process of cutting the leaves and stems apart and combining them on sumi-e paper by printing them individually. The class tried it out and moved on to print on paper from HPI; Sekishu Tsuru, Hosho White, Harukaze, Toyo, colored Unryu, and Bhutan Mitsumata Natural. Sachi and I had some fun printing our own works as well:
Before we knew it, the workshop was over and it was time to go! Hopefully, we will be able to do another plant printing workshop in the future.
*Product Spotlight*
Specially for the class, Eric recommended the recently published “Creating Art From Nature: How to Handprint Botanicals” by John Doughty & Sonja Larsen. With plenty of illustrations and guides, the book teaches how to make easy, amazingly detailed images of plants by applying inks and paints to plants and pressing them onto various surfaces.
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