An Inky Experiment

A fellow ICADian Suzanne Hershey Ford recently posted a little art experiment that I thought I would like to try.  She took flower blossoms and made them into an ink/watercolor by boiling them.  I found some instructions on-line that said you could just pour boiling water on them and let them sit for a while which appealed to me more so I looked around for some blossoms.  

The redbuds were blooming in the yard and were fast approaching the "browning" stage but I managed to collect about a half cup of them.  I spooned boiling water over them and let them sit for a couple of hours but they did not give up any detectible color.

All or most of the daffodils in the yard are done, and we do have other flowers planted but they're much too young to give up enough of their blossoms for this experiment.  Then I looked around inside.  HWNSNBP had "found" a forgotten potted amaryllis bulb in the basement about a week or so ago that was sending up it's flower spike.  It did bloom late last week, but the blossoms were beginning to fade so I picked off the two nearly shriveled ones and tried the boiling water again.

I also noticed that one of my orchid plants had suddenly dropped all of it's blooms and they still had some color in them so why not try these also.

As you can see from the photos above, the amaryllis gave up some good color but the orchids not so much.  There was just the faintest hint of color from them.

So I got out some watercolor paper and started playing around.  I wet the paper and dripped the color on it first and let that dry.  Then I loaded the brush with the liquid and layered some circles on, letting it dry between layers.

On this one I just used the paintbrush pressed lightly onto the paper to make flower petals.  In between the flowers I used the orchid ink in dots to see what it would look like dry.  

When these were dry I took out a sepia and burgundy micron pens and outlined the circles and the flowers.  I also added some white gel pen to the circles and the centers of the flowers.  I used colored pencils to turn those orchid ink dots into flower centers by giving them their own petals pushing them to a lower layer.  

The next test of these would be to see how long the ink lasts when exposed to sunlight.  I think I'm going to test adding Micro Glaze over these to make them into oversized postcards.  We shall see over time.  In the meantime, I'll probably be keeping my eye out for more colorful petals to experiment with.