Botanical Dye from Flower Petals: Growing, Making & Painting

1. Introduction: Botanical Dye from Flower Petals: And welcome to this class. Growing, making and painting, botanical dies. I'm Janice Steph Go, I'm a graphic designer, illustrator and botanical fine art painter. You may have seen some of my work on publications, packaging, branding, billboards, and even point-of-purchase displays. I develop this class because I wanted to a more sustainable, health conscious and earth friendly way of creating my illustrations and my artwork. As much as I love working with all of my clients, my true passion is gardening. And through this process, I can incorporate my gardens, my love of painting, and my love for my client into one healthy and sustainable practice. It's a great technique that can be used not only on paper, but also in fabrics. It does have its origins in the textile industry. So these dyes will work on not only paper, but on fibers, reds, and fabric as well. So if you are a quilter or a crafter, or someone who's just curious about botanical dies, or a gardener. And also anybody wanting to learn about landscape painting. Because as an added bonus at the end of this class, I will be showing you a few quick techniques. And we're going to create a quick technical dye color palette using three different types of flowers. There's a downloadable list for supplies. And if you're not already a gardener or a painter, don't worry, I will guide you through all of those steps is simple flower pot on your window sill, your porch, your patio, or even on your kitchen counter, will do just fine. You don't need a lot of flowers either. You can gather a few at your local farmers market or garden center. And a few petals for each of the three different primary colors will do just fine and preview the whole class. I think it's helpful to know what you're going to be doing and then watch it again at a slower pace. After all, at Skillshare, you can watch these classes as many times as you want. This is, after all, your art practice, your skills that you're learning and adding to. And I'm so glad that you're here and we'll see you in the class. 2. Welcome to Class!: Before we gather up anymore petals, I'm going to take you into my studio where I'm going to show you how many petals you need and all the other supplies that you're going to need to make your botanical dive patients. Most of the teeth a little bit about the history of botanical dying. And then we'll get started on that project, making our color palettes. Come on into my studio with me. Let's get started. Welcome into my studio. This is the area of my studio where I do most of my creative work. I have my computer here that I do a lot of graphic design and digital illustrations on. And it's also where I do a lot of my fine art painting and some of my painted illustration work. It's also where I create my paints made out of my botanical dies. I do over in my kitchen area of this studio. I have a spot where we will go and we will be making our actual dye and dye bath over there and extracting and also where we will be clipping our swatches to let those dry when we get to that portion of the class. And we're going to talk a little bit about the supplies that you are going to need after that. In the next lesson, after the supplies, we're going to go over some foraging, gathering and gardening techniques. And I'll let you know which types of flowers that you really could focus on gathering so that you'll get optimal dies. And I'm going to tell you the characteristics of those dyes with all of the commercially available paints and pigments available. Why have I chosen to do this? Well, it's very simple. I believe it's great for the Earth. 3. Supplies You Will Need: Here are the supplies that you will need. Is just some plain sea salt available at any grocery store. A couple of strangers, really one we'll do just a fine mesh. If you faint pink brushes, actually one would do just fine. Something to measure with. You're going to need three glass jars. I only have one here, but you will need three with lids, preferably. Maybe three more, or even just some glass jars to strain your dye into. Once you haven't made, you'll need a few flower petals. Not a whole lot. About a third of a couple of probably do, and they can be fresh or dried. You'll need some paper, watercolor paper or cloth. Ribbon will do, but makes sure both your paper and your fabric, or 100% cotton, it works best. Nothing synthetic. Just plain old sea salt. You don't want anything with iodine, table salt would do but seesaw, I find works best. Some shares for trimming your flowers, something to mark things with. And then a couple of little clips for hanging up your swatches to dry. Really nothing too complicated. And things that you probably already have some additional supplies that you may find useful is a little pan pallets such as this, or even just a little porcelain dish plate or even another additional small jar will do. For our swatches. We're going to want to cut our ribbon or fabric into strips. I have about three inches by about 1.5 inches. You can use smaller or larger depending upon the size of Girard that you have picked, you want to be able to dip that in there. I also, for my paper swatches, I have a little bit smaller. You can really use whatever size that you are comfortable with. So we'll go ahead and we will just cut one, measure one, and then use the second one. Use your first one as a guide for yourself for subsequent ones. And you'll notice I do have written on the back what I used for that. It's nice to just keep a record of what you're doing. And you can go ahead and cut as many strips as you think that you're going to want. Now if you have fabric rather than the ribbon, you obviously want, you'll have more cuts to make. And that's okay. Then you'll want to do the same thing for your watercolor paper. And if you have, if you want to be really particular and precise, you can grid it all out and use an exacto knife. I'm just going to rough it in. But notice how I'm trying to be very expedient with my paper so that I might have to make a whole lot of cuts. That's why I chose that size. Because this is a I convenient size of paper. It comes in a pad. It is a Strathmore and you can get several swatches out of one sheet. 4. Foraging, Gathering & Gardening: Welcome to my porch and to my porch flower garden, where I am growing a wealth of color for us to gather from. Our petunia actually have a wealth of color. They are an edible flower and they are full of anthocyanins. I have been using a combination really. It's a purply color and also this magenta pink you can even use for that. It's pretty amazing because no matter what the outside pigment, they do seem to really produce quite a bit of that bluish anthocyanin color and the dye pot. They are flavonoids. And you can do rubbings. It's quite fascinating to get some of the pigment. There are techniques, shrubby and hand pounding of the flowers that are fascinating. I'm a painter though, so I really wanted to learn how to extract these pigments to use in my painting. And here's where the chlorophylls are. But I have found the chlorophyll is a very difficult, for some reason, a very difficult pigment to extract from actionable leaves if you can't do it. But I've really focused on the parts of the plant. The pedal parts that have the anthocyanins, particularly in our Petunia does. And if there are any parts that are brown are starting to decay, decompose, just go ahead and clip those out. I like to just keep some containers available, clean ones you can use your glass jars if you would like. But just to start really kind of gathering the different colors that we're going to want. And those are for our blue, believe it or not, because we're going to isolate those anthocyanins and create more of the blue tones. And then here we are going, as you can see, we've got some more of the red and purple tones that are in there. And I'm going to just go ahead. I want to clip out all of those good petals. And if there are any that are brown or decayed, don't include those. We need to separate those out. You can see this one is already starting starting to weld a little bit. I think this one yesterday. And it is a little bit wilted, which is okay. We're going to actually with our warm water, we're going to warm it up anyway. And I did have this one on my counter for a few days. After all the joy of gardening is to be able to pick them, to bring them into our homes and to enjoy them. And then as they start to wilt, you bring new life to them. You create, you create pigment that you can die. Your clothing, some OT towels, your kids clothes with that maybe you've gotten some stains and tablecloths, lots of things you aprons, things that you can just really revitalize. And you can also paint a painting with them. It is just beautiful to be able to really get in and enjoy your flowers in a whole new way. Ours that we grow in our gardens and even some of the weeds that we think are weeds are actually there cleaning up that water before it hits those lakes and ponds and streams because they serve a very important purpose. And not only are they cleaning up our water systems, but they're also helping pollinators. We're growing food sources for our birds or bees and butterflies, and also protection for them. So growing a rain garden or a bios whale is one way to really help to get the contaminants out of the runoff before it hits our ponds or lakes and streams. Some flowers around your vegetable patch. And they will actually help each other. And while you're at it, you can harvest some color as well. So just to recap, we are sorting our petals here. We have gathered them for our garden. Unless you have access to a safe space where you can go forage. You know what can make goals and how the plants in that area may have been treated. They may have pesticides or insecticides or fertilizers on them. Or you may be in an area where those flowers are not yours to take. So be careful how you go about going into other people's spaces and places in gardens, even public gardens to forage. It's really best if you stick with your own garden or a friend's garden, or really ask permission ahead of time if you can go in and dead head or take fresh petals and remember to wash them thoroughly when you bring them in. And after we've made our three colors, our yellow or red and blue, then we will do some mixing in fresh clean jars. We'll mix some of our secondary colors, and we'll also be mixing some on our paint palettes. So whether you're here for just strictly learning how to do this as a dying medium for fabric or ribbon. That's great. And if you want to continue to do more exploration with the painting, then stick around for those lessons. 5. Making Botanical Dye from Flower Petals: In a minute, we'll go over into the kitchen area where we will make our dye bath out of all of our flower petals and will want some warm. Fairly warm doesn't need to be boiling and could even just be really hot tap water will do. So. You want to make sure that you have that available when we begin to make our diabetes. So now that we have all of our petals sorted, not you could do one color at a time. But I'm gonna do all three of them because we're here and it's more time effective. I like to match my work. So like you saw, I like to gather usually in the mornings from most flowers. Some flowers are better off in the evening like lilies and things that are mourning bloomers and then die off in the evening. I tend to go gather those then, but these flowers really pretty much anytime during the day, but it was morning when I gathered these, it's starting to get towards noon and it's getting a little toasty at the flowers are okay being a little bit hot and humid, actually the warmth kind of kinda helps to release their color, which is why we're going to use them hot wire in a minute here. But first, another thing that helps to release the color is something that we've all used and it's a very common element. And it's the same as cooking, something that releases the color and releases the flavor in your food. It's just salt. Table salt will do. I like to use sea salt and not a whole lot. This is an old-fashioned teaspoon. This is a quarter teaspoon. And I haven't even had this all the way filled. In fact, about an eighth or a smudge or a pinch will do is probably a four ounce jar. We're not going to fill it all the way up with water. There again, I'm going to use about two tablespoons probably. Like I said, I use hot water, not boiling. I just like to cover the petals. We don't need a whole lot. And in fact, I'd rather go make fresh and keep it going fresh as I go then to make a whole lot. So you can see, I'm just sort of swirling around. And if you were expecting it to immediately look yellow, I'm sorry to disappoint you. It doesn't really work that fast. We're going to let that sit for a little bit. I will cap it in a minute. Some of these will release the color really quickly and some of them walk. So we're gonna go ahead and do our red. Notice I am putting I am putting the Salton and then I'm putting the water in and i'm I'm not going to bother to measure this. Like I said, I usually just cover the petals. Give it a little bit of a swirl in there. You can see we're not getting quite yet. Set this out to the side because I am prone to spilling things. So now I'm going to add these hot. And if you want to label, you can write right on the top of the Sharpie or make yourself a little tag. Whatever you like to do. I do tags. Forget what I use, but I'm pretty consistent about the flowers that I use. Now after trying a lot of them, just right, you are bypassing lot of lot of trial and error here by watching this class. And I've got more tips and tricks in other classes. This one is already starting to release some of that color, which is nice. That should set up pretty well. This May 1 take a little bit longer. Although it's turning pink. Can you see against the white? You can see that. Notice I'm not shaking these real, real hard. You don't want to really a macerate the, the petals. You don't want to get all of that pedal part in there because we are going to drain that off later. On the supply was she made notice that you need a strainer and we will be using this is just a typical kitchen strainer. You could find it most grocery stores. Or if you have a tea strainer or a cocktail strainer, that will do. But again, try to keep it if you're gonna do this more than, more than once, or even just font, try not to use something that you use with your own food or your own cocktails or, or things. Unless we're using edible flowers and you know, no one in your family has a reaction to them, but be on the safe side and just designate designate your items. Let's talk a little bit about why we are using caligula, rose petals and petunia petals rather than using weld matter and indigo. If you came into this class with a little bit of knowledge of botanical dying for the textile industry on fabric, yarn threads. You may have been expecting that we were going to be talking about those three substances. And here we are not talking about those. We're talking about flower petals. And the main reason that I have opted out of those is for simplicity sake, it's a very quick process. We're not boiling the petals in a vat. We're not letting them ferment. We're not letting them sit up for weeks at a time. We're not drawing them into cakes. We are simply releasing and look at that, look at that beautiful color. I hope you can see it already setting up a hold it down here. But already in it's only been a couple of hours that this has been sitting. So that's already releasing some phenomenal color. And where does this color come from? Well, if you heard me say earlier that none of these petals are toxic, they're actually, they're full of flavonoids, but that's what we are releasing here, that's the pigment then. That is the dye. Pigment and water dye bath creates the pigmented water. What us don't drink it, but it's better for the environment. It's better for our pollinators. It's better for us because at some point this is going to be discarded and disposed. At some point, I'm going to have to get rid of these. And they're simply salt and flower petals. 6. Mordants & Modifiers: We had talked about isolating those anthocyanins that are in these flower petals and the red petals, as well as these purple and pink petals. They all have the same anthocyanins in them, which we have to isolate. And now we want to try to shift these with a modifier to, to shift that pH levels so that we get a blue, more of a true blue rather than the pink or the purple shapes that were naturally getting out of these petunia pedals. And blue is a very difficult color to adhere from botanical substances, which is why indigo and woad really rose to the forefront. But I promised you a more simplistic process here and not one that is so complicated is working with indigo and woad. And so we're going to use and very readily available substance which you, if you do any canning or any pickling you may already have in your kitchen and that is alum. And we're just going to add about, again, about a little less than a quarter of a teaspoon, somewhere between an eight and a quarter of a teaspoon. Again, this is, this is more like cooking, not baking. You can be a little less exact, but I've got about three tablespoons of flour pebbles in here, probably about a quarter cup of water and about an eighth of a cup of, I'm sorry, not cup an eighth of a teaspoon of the moment, about a quarter of a teaspoon of our sea salt. I'm gonna go ahead and let those sit up. It is going to take this one longer than, than our red and yellow. To get our pigment released, it is probably going to take overnight. So be patient. And I just noticed I've got a little bit of a green bit in there. A little bit of the leaf, which is not a big deal. And something that is just scoop it on out like you would an eggshell out of your scrambled eggs. I have a little bit of I have a pair of tweezers here that I like to keep on hand to do that with. But you could even just use a spoon or something else. An edge of the knife or something that you may have available. Again, just keep these things isolated for using with your dice and not for something that you will be cooking or eating with. Just unimportant little tip there to keep these things, your utensils separated. And you'll notice I have labeled on here, what we are using, these are petunia petals. And now I'm going to add that we put our sea salt in there. And also our alum. I don't bother really using ratios anymore, although when you start out, you might want to do that, but I know I'm pretty consistent with these now. I've been doing this for awhile. I do try to keep my materials and my quantities and what I'm using fairly consistent. Now I want you to notice the differences on different types of materials. This is actually a cotton ribbon and same flower petals. This is on the Strathmore watercolor paper, and then this is on a different type of water paper. It's a hot press rather than a cold press. And then same thing here. We've got on the fabric, and then we've got on the watercolor paper, same flower, same petals, but they do come out very different on different substrates. And also the water that you have, it has different chemicals in it, so it has Different pH level than mine might. And really what we're after here is a neutral pH. So if you really want to control it, consider using distilled water or even bottled water and be consistent with what you're using? I just use my tap water. I know what I'm going to get. I do sometimes tested for PH, but I don't get that exact him with it. If you want to have a truly controlled experience, then you might want to consider getting distilled water. So here we have, and I will take away our pretty little props here and just show you the beautiful color that we have here from our calendar lists and our rose petals. Very common flowers in your garden. And if you are not able to come up with some Caligula's, Coriolis will do, as well as pot marigold. And actually pot marigold and Caligula are usually the same thing. And if you're again, if you're having trouble finding those sources, check with your local garden center to grow some of these beautiful botanical flowers and even maybe start your own dye garden at some point. So there you have our extracts that we've isolated these pigments and we've extracted them into our solutions here. Next we will drain and strain off our flower petals so that they don't know or get bacteria. And then we went to keep them very, very clean and pure. Because then after that, after we've strain them, we will be using them to adhere to our paper and our fabric. And one of the things that's going to help them to adhere we've already used. And I will be telling you about that in the lesson when we start to make our swatches. 7. Straining & Draining Botanical Flower Dye: Extracted our pigment from our flower petals by using our fixative. And then we modified our petunia paddles so that we would actually get a more true blue. We use are fixative, which was the sea salt to release that color. And then the fixative is also then going to fix it to our fabric and our paper. And we will be doing that in the next lesson after this one, where we will actually make our color swatches that then we'll make into our color wheel. But first we have to drain off our botanical extract. That's the liquid, It's the water that now has those anthocyanins and those carotenoids in the water, we've made a solution, a pigment of solution, which we now need to strain off our petals because these petals, they will begin to mold. And we also don't want those in our fabric or in our paint. That will be on our paper. We want to get rid of those and just have our pure color on your supply list. You probably noticed that there were strangers. So I said a fine mesh strainer. You're a little T ball or will do even a cocktail strainer, they do have a finer mesh. Even a little gravy strainer or a kitchen strainer will do just fine as well. Although you may have a little bit more of the bits left in here. So if you have larger petals, such as the petunia petals or even the rose petals. This will be appropriate for those, for the calendar which has very fine petals. I'm going to stick with probably the T baller. So we'll go ahead and use that. And again, I'm not going to use this for t after this. I use this just really for using this process. And you could even just really use this like tea and fill this with your flower petals and then submerge it. Sometimes they don't fit row roll into the jars though. So I I do make them sometimes with this, but we're just going to strain this off here. And you can see how beautiful that color really is. It's a beautiful, just a nice really. What I think is a rich yellow. It's not too green. It's not too orange. It's just a beautiful, beautiful color. So I'm going to let that the little extra bits I do keep in my sink. I do keep a little container that I actually will then put these petals into and take them back out into my garden, into my garden and use them as compost. They are that same. So next up we'll do the, read the red roses here. I'm gonna go ahead and set this over here on my piece of paper. Rather than I normally would just take it over to the sink, but I'm going to keep moving with this so that we can get onto the next lessons. So now we have this probably could set up a little bit longer, but we're gonna go ahead and strain that off. It's just a beautiful color. But there are still some of the petals that you can see in here that do still have some of that pinkish pigment on them. They have not completely released yet. So it will get even richer and darker if we continued to leave this. So I'll let this sit here. Again. I'm going to go ahead and take this over to my sink. I don't mean to turn my back to you, but I don't want to get that spread around on my little table top here. I'm going to let those go into my composting area. You can see some of that pigment already on the paper. Quite pretty. Sitting there on that paper. We'll let that sit over here and in dry up a little bit. It'll it'll absorb into that paper to be fixed to that paper because our fixative, our seesaw. So there you have the lesson, a quick little lesson. I'm straining and draining to really isolate our botanical extracts. So now up next, we will be creating our color swatches. 8. Making Primary Color Swatches: Now it's time to eat. Been part of this whole process. Getting to see what our colors look like on our little desk swatches. We're going to start making our papers swatches. And it's a very simple process. This won't take long at all. We're just simply going to dip these in for now. I like to see the same color as a quick dip and then as a long soak. So as you can see, I'm sort of leaving, I'm leaving the jar over a little bit, not, not allowing it to run out, but just doing a quick dip where I'm holding the paper in. So that when I set it upright and look at that already, it's absolutely beautiful. This is the quick dip of color. Hold a plain piece of paper up in front of that so you can see a little bit better. But that's the plane dip. And then we're going to just let it sit right there in in there and I'll even let that sit probably overnight so that it will really intensify and you'll get the rich color. And again, I'm doing the same thing that I did before. I'm doing a quick dip. And you can see that beautiful color. And then I'm going to just let that sit in there a little bit longer. That's why I like to use these small jars. You can, and this is one of the reasons I have the clips. You can go ahead and just click that right there to the side of the jar. And let that stay. If you're worried about it, kinda falling in, but it's really not going to, if you've measured out your strips similar to the width of the width and height of your jar, jar. So that is why it is nice to gather all of your supplies ahead of time so that you don't have the unfortunate episode of your strips not fitting into your jar or being too little or too short. So we'll do this again with our blue, Our beautiful petunia pedal blue that we did use our modifier with. Hello again, bullet that. Click that on there. And just let those sit. And then we'll come back again. We'll pull these out. I have a little bit of a line ready and waiting that will click these two and let them dry. And while they're drying, we will do our fabric swatches. If you have a nice little place to go ahead and hangers. Really, this is just a piece of twine hung up, as you can see between my little bookcase ends. You could hang them between knobs on your cabinets. I don't have knobs on my cabinet doors, but you could even do something like that or if you have a closed line in your laundry room. And now here for our petunia pedal blue. And I've only been letting these, and these have only been soaking for about an hour or so. So you may have more intense color. So now while we let our primary colors dry there for a little while, we're going to proceed to our cloth. And this is a 100% cotton ribbon. And I'm just going to cut this into strips using a pair of scissors. Nothing too complicated. Let's just say in our same sequence, I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm gonna do a quick dip just to show you the initial color. And I'm going to let that go up a little bit further up into the fabric. So that when, when we let it sit down inside and let it just soak in there for awhile, we'll get the more intense color. But already again, an absolutely beautiful yellow. An absolutely beautiful yellow from our calendar, Lula. And then I'm going to let that soak in there a little bit more. And with the cloth, I do I do use these clips more frequently just because the cloth might be a little on the fluffy side and just kinda cascade down into that dye bath. And I don't want that. I want to be able to see the variation from white to the light first pool, and then on down to a longer soak. And bear in mind that your clock is going to absorb that color up in probably a little bit more so than your paper. Although watercolor paper is fairly absorbent. And you might also want to have something like a spoon, something stainless steel. Again, not something that you use on food to kind of push that around down in there. Now, if you do want to cover the entire piece of fabric or cloth, go ahead and push it all the way down in. Put your lid back on and let it soak. And there is some fun in doing solar dying, where you're actually just letting it sit in your window sill or outside and letting the heat of the day help to release that color and to fix it will help the salt fix it into the fibers. Again, another economical and environmentally friendly way of doing this process is the solar dying. It works best on the cloth, not so well on the paper I found. But you could do different. You might find different. You might find different results. So we'll let my clip is not going to cooperate, so I'll just let that sit there. It's not quite big enough. You need a bigger quick like this one. I have used it over there. I'll have to snag it in a minute. But we'll do the let that sit there and now we'll go on to our pedal petunia or pedal petunia, pedal blue. Tongue twice, tongue-tied here. Oh my goodness. Our first pool is really beautiful. I keep saying beautiful, but my gosh, they just start there gorgeous. And I have to say, every time I do this, I just loved the results. So that's a beautiful, beautiful, really more of the indigo. I do have tricks to get the cyan blue. The anthocyanins were isolating and I do have tricks to get that. But for these, for this class, we're just going to stick with these as our primary colors. Now that our fabric swatches have had time to sit up for a little bit. We're going to pull them out of their dye bath solutions as well and hang them up on with our papers swatches. So I think for this process, a pair of tweezers is a very handy thing. I have these kitchen tongs. Again, I'm only using them for my fabric dyeing. But it's nice to just use those two kind of fish these out of your solution. Especially if you have not clipped them on. But we'll let our cloth ones join our papers swatches. I'm going to pull this out. Also. It's good idea to have a little paper towel or cloths sitting around and you can see some of the color already on that. Pull these out and just kinda keep these colors pure as you do the process each time. I have some more little clips. You could use little clothesline. Little clothesline clips. I think these paperclips work pretty well. You could even use the traditional paperclip. Whatever you have around. You don't need to buy anything new. I don't I doubt unless you don't have anything like this around your house. And if you did put that onto your jar, you might not need to use the tweezers or the toms. Although I'm going to just to stretch this out again to kind of keep it on curled so it dries nice and flat. It's a little bit easier to make our color wheel when they're nice and flat. Sorry to have my back to you. Sorry to have my back to you. But here we go. Our three primary colors on our two different substrates are 100% cotton, watercolor paper and are 100% cotton cloth. This is cotton ribbon. So next up, we're going to use the same extractions to make our secondary colors. 9. Making Secondary Color Swatches: Using the same dye bath extraction solutions to make our colors orange, green, and purple. We will then make similar swatches as we have drawn here, which we will then use to make our color wheel. If you know very much about color processes and color wheels, you can already anticipate what we're probably going to get. I'm going to add just kind of equal amounts of both of those. Although you might want to start with your lighter color and then add your darker color in as you go to get the shade that you're after. I put about equal amounts of both m. And now we're going to start with our paper just to keep in the same sequence that we have been using. We'll do a quick dip first and foremost and see what happens. Now. Alternatively, I think you're gonna like what's happening here is a very beautiful soft orange. Now, alternatively, you could just layer on your lighter color first on your paper. We'll talk about that when we do to our painting. And then overlay that with your darker color. Sometimes it's really nice to just start out with the fresh pigment though. And again, I did a quick dip at the top to see what would happen. And then I'm going to let that just soak in there. And we'll move on to doing our other two colors. So now we have our yellow and our blue. We need another clean jar, clean and dry. You don't want any kind of soap residue or anything left in there. So I've gone ahead and clean clean them and drive them out. We'll get a, another fresh piece of paper. And this time I'm going to add, as I had suggested before of little bit, I need to make sure that I leave some of this for for using just the plain pigment. I don't want to use that off because this is Oliver. This is all of our yellow dye. Certainly we can make more. Okay. But that's all we have for now. Actually had a little bit back in there. And then I'm going to add just a tinge of this because I don't want to overpower this lighter hue. So I'm going to be very careful. I'm going to add just a little bit in there. Let it swirl around. We'll add a little bit more. Now, this is what I wanted you to see. It goes a little bit sad, looking a little bit brown, looking in, in our initial poll. And I'm going to show you a quick tip here. It's surprising what comes out on paper. Don't always be fooled by what you see in the jar. Now as that dries, it is going to shift. And remember we can also use the shift that we used to modify the color here. We use that alum to modify the color. And we can also do that. Again. As we go into creating our secondary colors. I'm gonna go ahead and let that dry up. And you can see it's vastly different than what we had here on the paper. More similar to what we had on the clock. But again, these dry up into some surprising colors. So I'll go ahead and add that up here. And one thing that we have not talked about yet is keeping really good records on your swatches. As these dry up. I'm going to want to write on the back of them what we have used for each one of these colors. Because it's easy, as you can see to start to get a little bit confused. Which one was the pure yellow? Which one was the quick dip? Which one was the overnight soak? I like to keep pretty strict records on the backs of each one of these. But we're gonna go ahead and proceed to making our purple to make a color that is noticeably different and more purple than our red, but not as deep as our blue. But we're going to make one to make sure that we do keep enough of our blue pigment to use for our painting in our bonus lesson. So now we'll test that on our paper swatch. Again as I've done in the others, I'm going to do a quick poll. And then we'll let it soak for a little bit. You can see we're getting a very pretty purple color. Then let that soak for a little bit longer because I really do like what's happening with this longer soak. We can intensify these if we leave them in the dye bath solution a little bit longer, or even over dye them. But I wanted you to see how the quick poll looks on the cloth. I think it's absolutely lovely. The softer colors that we that we got from our blend of our primary colors. Which we will then use to make our color wheel, which is a wonderful tool for using in your garden landscape painting or even as a wonderful reference for using to select your dye garden flowers with a very useful tool. A reference for dying cloth and over dying things such as an old used tea towel or a tablecloth, or even some of your children's T-shirts and clothing. It will bring new life to them to be able to add such beautiful vibrant color. 10. Making the Swatch Color Wheel : Once your color swatches are nice and dry, both you're the ones created on your cloth and on your paper. Will do them separately though. We'll start with, let's start with the paper ones. And you can see you really have a lot of choices when it comes to how to actually make your color wheel. We're going to punch these. I've started with a couple of holes. I have labeled on the back what each of these dyes are, just so that we know as a reference later on what we've, what we've created as one of the purposes of it. Then you can either use a hole punch, you could really just kinda go in. And I like these little enamel pins got a few around. And you can even just gathered them up and put them doing it backwards. I'm sorry. So sorry. You can gather them up and put them through the back of your enamel pin. Or and then just don't forget to put the back on it. And then they'll just really kinda spin around on there and look very pretty. That's one way of doing it. You can also put them on a little clip, a little ring on there, or you can even just really take the easy way out, don't even you really want them to be versatile and mobile for you. Just simply click them with a little close to them. Or one of the clips like we used to hang them with that we'll do just fine and then you can take them out and just sort them out when you're creating your color palettes and using them for even purchasing your flowers in the garden. And like I've said, I'll have classes on both of those later on in Skillshare. And for the fabric, you can pretty much do the same thing. You can punch these if your fabric is stout enough or you can just simply click them together. This is another reason why I really like these little, these little enamel pins. You can just simply poke it through and clip the back. Put several of them together. Then they're easy to just take off and move about. Create different color combinations for your whimsy for your projects. If you're into patterns, surface pattern design or painting or decorating, home decor were just dying. Fabrics for your family. There's lots of different things that you can use this process for. Even over Dying old tea towels, tablecloths. It's a great, it's a great way to really recycle up cycle and reuse things that maybe you thought were ready to be discarded. But you can give new life to them by simply adding a few, a few days to them, painting over them. Creating something new and fun to give as a gift or to keep in your own home. So it's a very simple and very functional and very usable way of creating a color wheel. So have fun with yours. Continued to make yours in any way that you feel that it was best for your art and fiber art practice. 11. Painting with Dye : So what we'll do next is we're going to pour them right here directly onto this porcelain plate. I like to use white because it shows the colors better. I also like to use this particular type of a palate because it gives a little bit of a well and notice I'm not filling that all of the way. I am leaving some space. It's going to dry up a little bit. We somewhat tacky before we start to use it. You couldn't use it directly this way, but it's not going to be as highly pigmented. Some of the water is going to actually evaporate out of it so that we're left with more of the pigment itself. And then we can use this palette for mixing our colors. Because if you know very much about the color wheel, we can make an orange color out of the yellow and the red. And we can make a purple color out of the red and the blue. And then we can also then make a green out of the yellow and the blue. So we'll do some of that mixing on our palate, but most of it we will be doing on our paper as we paint our gardenscape. 12. Bonus: Paint a Garden Landscape-1: Let's talk a bit about brushes. Since this is a watercolor medium, we will, we will be using watercolor brushes. And I do have a lovely collection of them because they'd been painting in this medium for awhile. This is a round, round, whereas this is a round long. I'm holding up a piece of paper so that you can see the difference. Then this is also a round, round, but it is a more expensive brush with a longer barrel on it. This is where the water, the liquid pigment, would be mostly contained. And it's what differentiates a watercolor brush from, say, an acrylic brush. This is a landscape that we're going to do for our class project. I haven't oriented and a tall vertical that I've laid in this little triangular space here that we're going to start out with. And I'm going to have my warm and my cool. I like to keep two different waters because they do get they do tend to absorb some of the paint in the water as you clean your brush. Going to begin with a wet on wet technique. So with that, you actually do wet the paper. And what that does is it gives a path when we put the pigment on, you'll see in a minute a path on the paper to follow. And you can see I've got a few little spots on here that I want to leave white because in watercolor we don't actually have white. Will leave the paper as our white. Because watercolor is a transparent, not an opaque paint painting mediums, so it doesn't have a pigment for actually, for white. You could use gouache or acrylic to add on top. And there are some companies that do make a white watercolor. It has pigment. It's basically, it's essentially gouache. As you recall, I put that water on the paper. Now this is going to track in. I'm gonna just kinda guide it through. I'm going to grab a little bit more pigment out of there. And I'm going to just guide and see the more pigment the deeper it is. So I tend to like to leave it a little washy. Can always add, but it's not impossible to take it out. And I'll show you a trick on how you can take it out. But you can see as it kinda tracks around, I'm leaving, I'm leaving those little spaces. We're going to add some other colors and I don't want the green in behind that. I don't want the next color that I put into B2 muddied up by the green. And some of them I will leave white. I left my pencil marks a little stronger than I normally would, just so that you guys can that you can see them. Know where I'm going normally, I would just really put in there very, very lightly. But you can see it even if I tilted this up, it would start to roll around a little bit more down there. I have a fairly flat so you guys can see it. But you might want to elevate your board or your canvas a little bit to get that, to get that working around, I tend to just a little trick I learned decades ago to kind of go in and you're, I darken the corners a little bit. Tend to bring your eye more towards the center of your piece. And remember, we are doing landscape, so things, things grow. So i'm, I'm coming in and I'm giving it that sort of elongated brush. Notice I'm just sort of doing really quick sweeping motions, giving that elongated brushstroke of a stem or a leaf, leaving a more pigmented area here. And I'm going to, while I have that same color. And I'm gonna kinda do that in this next corner. Just a little bit. I don't want to I don't want it to be completely mirrored, but I want them to relate and I'm sorry, it looks like I have an old tissue in my hand, but what I do is it's actually a paper towel, cotton paper towel. And sometimes if I feel like I've put too much pigment in another pro tip, you can just dab, don't rub, just dab and you can lift some of that pigment out. If you feel like you put too much in. What I'm trying to do is to give a sense of space here. A little bit darker here is going to fade out as it goes up. And then you're gonna get a little bit of edge and we'll go in and put some more and we can even layer up as we go. But that's a starting point for our project. 13. Bonus: Paint a Garden Landscape-2: Now we're really getting the true effect of a wet on wet. See how that just starts to find, find the course that I laid in. And just really, you can see that moving right through. I think that's always just so interesting. It will start to just really move in where I laid down that water before we, before the pigment and it will just flow. This is the relaxing, fun part about watercolor. And it's really unique to this medium. And sometimes it does the work for you. I think it's more relaxing than any of the other mediums truly. That's kinda pretty, I like how that's how that's reading. How that's where I'm gonna I'm gonna put UCI carried a little bit of that paint through here. I'm going to carry a little bit of it in here. I want the eye to move through my painting and to see some of these colors happening throughout. Start to layer in a little bit more detail. Repetitive patterns. It's always nice. I like to see some repetitive patterns throughout these pieces. This is a landscape. We're going to see some of the land going up into the sky. You can see it starts to take shape. And like I said, I did go in, I made myself some guidelines just so I knew where I wanted to head. You wouldn't have to. You could just play and really let the, let the colors kinda create your own landscape. You would not have to put the guidelines and it all just something that I like to do, especially as I'm teaching. You see now this has o is holding a lot of water in here. I'm gonna go ahead and lay that in again. And we'll do some fun stuff. It's still got a little bit of that green paint in it. Going around my little my little spots. You. Okay, and let's shift colors again. Let's see as we go up, we're going a little less intense as graying out a little bit more, washing out a little bit more. See what else we've got to work with here. This is one of my favorite colors. And it's a secret, but it's made out of not going to tell you that yet. But it's one of my favorite things. Favorite Things were really kind of getting in a painting to read as if it's in the distance. Kind of gradually getting up into those those ranges where it turns from land to sky and sometimes you're not sure which has width. One of the joys. It's a little bit of a meditative process for me. This is a small piece of paper, actually, it's, it's a grid it off to pretty much nine by seven. It's on this is Strathmore. Strathmore. Know what kind of let that move around the page for a minute here. This is Strathmore watercolor. It's cold press, and it is a 400 series, nine by £1240. So it's got a good weight to it, a good thickness to it. It will hold up on its own. You can see here some of my strokes here. Someone when I practice strokes and I usually warm up before I start in on a painting. It's, I think it's a really good idea to just go in and just give you, I'm not gonna do it here because I don't want that to retract on the back here or even to get on here. But just to do some warm-up strokes, I think it takes the intimidation of working on a piece of paper out because you really can just feel like you're ready to go. You've practiced a little bit. You've got yourself in the mood to do this. If you aren't in the mood at the strokes aren't common, walk away. Go do something else. Go work on your, a little, little drawing. Go work on sketches, go make some paint to go do something else. Because if it's if it's not happening and it's not, you're not in the mood. Walk away for a few minutes, come back to it. You don't have to walk away. I mean, you don't have to walk away forever, Rockaway all day, but just kinda know no one to let it sit for a minute. But at two Fe, to use no cooking term plus let it simmer. Be thinking about it. They doing something else. Clean your brushes, clean your studio, and come back to it. Warm-up again, come back to it. You can see I have these pigments stashed in all kinds of places. That is a lot stronger of a pigment than I planned. And that's okay. It's up in here. Again, it's going to help define my corners here. And I'm going to really wash it out and drag it down a little bit more gray than I had wanted. So I'm going to find something with a little bit more of a blue pigment in there. If I can't find that, that's okay too, because I'll do my trusty little paper towel trick. And just notice again, I am not rubbing. I am blotting. I'm blotting this out. And I kinda like what's happening there. Now some people are really rigid about keeping the paper in the same spot and never moving it. I totally disagree with that. If you need to move it, move it. Otherwise, move yourself. Get up, stand. I'm sitting on a high high chair, but it's a desk chair that I have up to the hi As Type. I like to be over my work a little bit more than that. Maybe most people do like to be able to get in and really see and see. I've changed my brushstroke here now I'm, I'm I'm doing a real, I'm doing a side, side hold and I'm flicking, flick, flick, flick, flick that color out of there. Notice I'm leaving the eye into the center. Other pro trip tip. Okay. Alright. Doing more of what I wanted it to. But I mean, you could stop right there with your framework and just leave it like Pat. You could leave it open. Really, it's your painting, your painting practice, your style. You don't have to do what I'm doing. Painting should be a joyful practice. 14. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me here in this class and taking this journey with me into grocery making and painting botanical die from flower petals. I've so enjoyed having you here in my studio out in my flower dye garden and sharing with you about that, This wonderful process. I'd love to see what you have come up with. I'd like to see your botanical die. I'd love to see your swatches, how you make your color wheels, and also your final paintings, or even just some process along the way. So go ahead and share and upload some pictures that you take, even just with your phone will do into the project gallery, bloated my project there, my final painting you've had noticed, I didn't finish it during our class demo, but I have finished it and I have uploaded it to the project gallery. So you can check out the final painting there and please add your final projects or even projects that aren't finished. Show us your process and your brand photos. And I'm sure the rest of the students in the class would really enjoy seeing your projects as well. And maybe you'll get some valuable feedback. So enjoy teaching you everything that I know. Well, not everything. I still got other classes to share on growing, making and painting. Botanical die from flower petals. You would like to learn more about botanical die. Please follow me here on Skillshare. And again, thank you so much for being here and taking this class with me. And I really hope that you will take more classes. So that's your journey into growing, making and painting with botanical die from flower petals can continue to grow.