Fun with Flower Pounding and Dendritic Mono Printing

I've been playing around with printing techniques the last couple of weeks.  One of my friends in my Cutting Edge group had been talking about doing some flower pounding so I checked that out.

These are geranium petals, which released some beautiful deep colors.

I added some colored pencil details to them, then ended up smudging them, 

then had to bleach out the smudges, which left some yellowing. 

Then I had to rinse out the bleach so it wouldn't eat up the fabric. So now I'm back to paler colors and will need to pound some more petals on them. 

Live and learn!   

From what I read online, I should have soaked my fabric in alum first, which may have helped. 

I will sure give that a try next time.

 Then I moved on to making dendritic mono prints. You may be thinking, what the heck are those?

Dendritic means "Of pertaining to, or resembling a dendrite. A Dendrite is a mineral crystallizing in another mineral in the form of a branching or treelike mark. or a branched part of a nerve cell that transmits impulses toward the cell body.

A mono print is a form of printmaking where the image can only be made once, as opposed to other printmaking which allows for multiple originals. We created some of these in Betty Busby's class last year and it was great fun. It also brought back some great memories of making these in an introductory printing class at Cardinal Stritch college, many moons ago.

I first applied thick acrylic paint, from a squeeze bottle,  to a piece of plexiglass. 

Next, I placed another piece of plexiglass on top and pressed down which squished the paint

 to form an abstract design. 

Then I carefully inserted a pallet knife between the two pieces of plexiglass to separate them.

The pressure of pulling the two pieces of plexiglass apart raises the paint 

into these cool dendrite forms.

Next, I carefully laid a piece of cotton on top of each side and gently pressed with my hand to  capture the design you see in the photo below.

Below are three dendritic prints made previously in Betty Busby's class.

After my dendritic prints dried, 

I painted them to match the background colors of the ones made in Betty's class.

Here are my prints drying outside.

The following day I put them up on my design wall and thought,

 "what the heck can I do with these?"

After playing around with them for awhile, I decided to cut them into squares and rearrange them.  Now I am in the process of sewing them together.