Printing trees

Explore traditional printing techniques. This week, I went on an excursion with my illustration class. We went into the woods to do some drawing, and Floor and I decided to explore some printing techniques in nature. So, we did some 'tree-printing', to capture the different structures of the trees. We put our paper against a tree and 'coloured' it in with grafite. Just like you would do with a coin as a kid. It was nice to discover the two sides of the 'print': the moss-coloured one and the grafite-side. I also printed some leaves, using different materials. Some leaves are traced with grafite, some are pressed into paint (which also gave a nice print on the other side of the paper). Some leaves I used as a stamp after they were pressed in the ink. The (in my opinion) best print was made when I pressed a wet leave into wet gouache-paint. I did this in my sketchbook. The leave in the gouache-paint wasn't great, but the print on the other side was! Because of the gouache paint that acts partly like aquarel and partly like acryl, the print print turned out to look like a strange combination of woodblock print and bleeding ink.