Hammered Florals
A Floral Postcard Created At The Workshop
Floral Month’s Family Friendly Workshop was a full sensory experience. We made a mess, made some noise, and got to enjoy the sweet scents of our flowers as we transferred their pigment to the page. Here is everything you need to try out this creative prompt at home!
SET UP
You will need watercolor paper in your preferred size, paper towels, a hammer, and a cutting board or spare board to protect your work surface. The watercolor paper will tolerate the moisture from your leaves and petals, and the paper towel is a surprisingly necessary element to keep your blooms in place and control extra moisture. After that, all you need is your ink! I mean flowers! The best flowers to use for this exercise have highly pigmented, relatively flat petals. Herbs make for wonderful foliage. Azaleas, pansies, parsley, and phlox are some of my particular favorites.
HOW TO TRANSFER
Place your watercolor paper on top of your protective board. To transfer the pigment from your flowers or foliage, pick a bloom (or petal or leaf) and place it face down on your paper. You’ll want to pick your blooms as you’re ready to use them - the fresher the better for this exercise! Lay your paper towel onto the back of your flower. Using your hammer (or other tool), hit the covered flower with consistent force. You don’t want to hit it too hard, or your flower will break apart too much as you hammer it. If you’re seeing the full shape and color of your bloom/leaf on your paper towel, you’re doing it right. Once you’ve gone over the whole botanical, gently lift the paper towel. Some of the flower or leaf may be stuck to your paper. Gently peel it off with the paper towel, keeping in mind that wiping will spread the fresh pigment onto other areas of the page.
EXPERIMENTATION TIME!
Now it’s time to experiment! Grab a few different tools and a few different blooms, and see what happens! Designate a tester sheet to see what pigment comes off of your flowers and what marks your tools make! Sometimes pigments look vastly different on the paper than how we see them on the flower. And sometimes as the pigment is exposed to the air, the color will change. This is especially true with pinks and reds, which tend to become purple on the page. In this workshop, we found ourselves coming back to this experimentation over and over, and it was one of the most fun parts of the morning! We experimented with different styles of tools, such as a crab mallet and a meat tenderizer. We found that the small surface of the hammer worked best for transferring realistically, the meat tenderizer had a fun polka dot effect, and the mallet left concentrated crescent marks from its edges. We could tear petals and use our fingers to rub them onto the page to draw with the pigment. We also found that for flowers that were less flat (like carnations), we could peel the petals and deconstruct/reconstruct a flower more effectively than trying to transfer the whole thing at once.
COMPOSITION
Once you get a feel for your tools and your medium, you can lay out a design on your fresh watercolor page. I find it helpful to still hammer one bloom at a time, lift and check, then place and begin on the next one. Sometimes flowers can shift under the paper towel as you’re working on another area, so this is the best way to maintain your composition. Participants took many different approaches once we found methods that we liked. For blooms with a strong, yellow center, we found that hammering the edges of the petals and working our way in, lightly adding the centers at the end, helped maintain definition in those types of blooms.
One participant made a caterpillar, using pips from azaleas as antennae. Once we all saw the methods of each other’s experimentation, we could implement new techniques in our own pieces. Pips became a fun factor item, tying up a bouquet and being added into the centers of other blooms to add depth. And one participant’s stem deconstruction then became the caterpillar’s feet. The essence of what a Collaborative experience can do.
All in all this creative exercise was an absolute blast. Even the mess was beautiful. And it was wonderful to have an experience where it was equal parts experimentation with no specific outcome, and a crack at a semi-controlled composition. I hope you’ll try this creative prompt and share your questions and takeaways in the comments!
This was as fun for kids as it was for adults, so if you’re looking for an activity to do with the little ones in your life, I highly recommend seeing how they view flowers as a medium!
