Art Workshops

Making Nature tiles, was a great workshop that allowed participants to pick plants and flowers from nature. This made them think about textures and composition as colours will not come up in the casted imprint. 

To make these, I allowed them to explore there environment and pick a few small things to place and push into a small square cut piece of clay. 

Once they were happy with where they have placed there plants, they could then lift them off the clay leaving an imprint, which then allowed them to think about layers and creating an image from what they could see. 

Leave are particularly interesting as once you use a flower you can remove them and place the leaf in or around for the background which leaves a nice vein imprint. When they were happy with the image, we made a little wall around the tile with more clay, making sure it was sealed up, and then we mixed plaster of paris and poured this in and waited for it to set. 

I have experimented with cement mix and plaster of paris to create an interesting marble effect and a light grey tile where the embossed image came out very nicely. 

This turned out to be a very relaxing workshop, and I felt that the participants really enjoyed spending some time looking at the different plants and observing their textures and shapes.