Materials
Watercolor paper. In this video we use 200gsm 100% cotton cold-pressed watercolor paper with medium-rough surface. You can also try exploring with other types of paper, including carton box waste and recycled paper, but you would want to be extra careful with recycled paper as it's easy to tear apart due to its making process.
Soy milk for mordanting paper. The ratio is 1:5 -- one part of soymilk, dillute with five part of water. The amount of soy liquid really depends on how many paper you work with. (Please see video for step-by-step.)
Water -- to dampen your paper.
Assortment of plant matters. It will need a lot of practice to choose which tannin-rich plants to use. But to begin, as a reference: rose leaves, teak leaves, cosmos leaves + flowers, pine leaves, eucalyptus leaves, and many more. (You will need to check the plants based on what region you live in.)
Equipment and Tools
Container to put your soy liquid and paper
Wooden dowel / stick / rusty can / glass jar
Jute string / cotton twine / wool yarn
Clamp
Dye pot (boil pot or steam pot)
Stove
Tips
Keep exploring and experimenting. Use different mediums, fibers, and plants.
Take note or record your practice. This way, when a result is a big success, you will know how to do it next time!
Learn more from natural dye books and how other artists work, follow artists' instagram accounts that inspire you. (Our first suggestion: India Flint @prophet_of_bloom, the originator of ecoprint.)
Workshop Description
Ecoprint (also known as contact print and bundle dye) is a natural dyeing method of creating colors and prints on fabric and paper with plant matters, including leaves, flowers, barks, and seed pods, by using their own pigments and tannins.
In the past five years, Cinta Bumi Artisans have been exploring, experimenting and creating surface design with ecoprint method on natural fabric like silk, cotton, linen, tencel and rami, as well as on paper and bast fibers like paper mulberry barkcloth, abaca, and cassava paper.
Here at Pivot Bali, Novi -- founding artist of Cinta Bumi Artisans, take you closer to the process of ecoprinting on paper. The best thing about ecoprinting on paper is that while it is important to do prototype on fabric when you want to make a cloth project, sometimes it can be very expensive to get high quality of natural fabrics (unless you purchase it on a thrift store, which we also recommend). Exploring with paper gives you more freedom and "ease" in expressing your ideas and experimentation, before you jump to ecoprint on fabric.
Paper is also versatile as a material, and there are many possibilities to make it into various arts and crafts projects. Greeting cards, notebooks, art journals, concertina books, collage, scrapbooks, mix media installation, and the list goes on as far as you can think of.
We hope this tutorial helps and that you enjoy ecoprinting on paper. Don't worry if the first experiments are not as you expected (in fact, never really expect an ecoprint result to be exactly what we want it to be, because the result will always be a surprise).
For more updates and creative inspiration from us, follow us on instagram @cintabumiartisans and join our newsletter at www.cintabumiartisans.com.
Stay safe and be creative!