For the last month I've marveled at the beauty and number of flowers in my Minneapolis neighborhood. I've never seen so many flowers in all my life! I've lived in the same spot for a few years, and I think there really are more flowers this spring and early summer. But it's possible that I'm noticing them more because this is such a happy time in my life. I imagine telling our baby, grown up someday, "When I was pregnant with you, we lived in Minneapolis and there were so many flowers that spring!"
To satisfy my desire to document this amazing flower display, I made ink out of flower petals this week. I've been wanting to photograph and illustrate some of this fabulous flora for a while now, and painting them with petal-ink is the sweetest way I can think of to allow content to inspire form -- or, as one of this week's prompts puts it, to let the medium support the idea.
I used watercolor brushes and a bamboo dip pen to do this naive little painting. It was a lot like painting with watercolor -- something I enjoy but am definitely not spectacular at.
I'm including a few process photos (below), showing the flowers and leaves after I chopped them up. I boiled the materials, mixed with rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol), and set in the sun to reduce. The third photo below shows the final red ink. The only problem I had was with the green color; it's virtually impossible to make green ink from green plant materials. I think you have to make blue and yellow, and mix them. And I couldn't live with the yellow-brown in my little painting, so I super-saturated the leaves in Photoshop. I decided that it's my journal, and I can cheat if I want. :)
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