New Zealand native plants

Waikawa Walks Pigments

By: Celia Wilson 25 October, 2021

Handmade paint, New Zealand native plants, Paint making workshops, Pigments, Uncategorized, Watercolour paintart, environment, Interislander Ferry, Mahoe, Paintmaking, pigments, WaikawaLeave a Comment

Waikawa Bay is near Waitohi/Picton on Queen Charlotte Sound, and they are connected by a track through the Victoria Domain Park. There are other tracks in the Domain and you can walk to end of the peninsula; The Snout. We tried most of these three tracks and here are a couple of photos:

Seen from the track, a ferry on its way to Wellington and a New Zealand plant – I think Mahoe. Very striking colour!

We were staying in Waikawa in February 2020, and these pigments I collected during the walks. These were three different clays and one harder rock (the red pigment). I am trying to catch up with testing these pigments. It made a relaxing task compared to working towards exhibitions!

I rather like the #4 pigment, has an slight green colour to the brown. The sample “#5” in the photos above is the first paint I made at the workshop in September and is #4. Just to confuse us all. It is interesting how yellow pigments can give a variety of darker colours. After the last Workshop in September I posted images of some of the paints made. These paint tests are made with the full strength paint, so the colours are quite dark. I have watered down the red paint, and I also rub some of the pigment powder on to the test page, for the record.

Harakeke colours

By: Celia Wilson 6 November, 2016

Dyeing, Garden plants, New Zealand native plants, Pigments, Solar dyeing, Uncategorized3 Comments

Solar dyes. Some colours of Harakeke.

Walks in the Waitakere Ranges

By: Celia Wilson 15 November, 20156 May, 2016

Garden plants, New Zealand native plants, Organic paints, Pigments, Uncategorized, Watercolour paintLeave a Comment

Have just found this draft which was started late last year, so I thought I should finish it.

In November I spent a week near the Waitakere Ranges just north of Auckland, and had the opportunity for some lovely bush walks.

Paddocks and regenerating forest – Manuka a nursery species. Ponga, tree ferns, Kauri alongside the track.

Close up of Kauri bark. Gorgeous!

Crossed this stream. Typical of the bush streams in the area. This one is near civilisation.

Definitely not in the bush! Planted at the entrance to a property. Looks like a Black Eyed Susan vine Thunbergia alata.

Kawakawa , Macrocarpa excelsum– lovely holes in the leaves from it’s friendly co-habitant, the Kawakawa looper moth caterpillar.

I managed to find some pigments – mainly hard clay, and some small clay pebbles, rounded by the running stream water. I’ve never seen these before, was quite a surprise. Because they are wet, the colour comes off on to your fingers, and you can easily mark another harder surface. I thought perhaps that could have started the use of clay as paint…

Explore Find Collect Discover

By: Celia Wilson 23 January, 201523 January, 2015

Dyeing, Garden plants, Nature prints, New Zealand native plants, Patchwork, PrintsAkua inks, art, cotton, dyes, Nature prints, New Zealand plants, patchwork, Pohutukawa blossom, weedsLeave a Comment

Progressing with my little piece of fanciful endeavour. The weather is too hot to do much but I am enjoying this evening pastime. Trying to contextualise this piece, I found it lends itself to ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’. The ‘borrowing’ comes from Spirit Cloth, so thanks to Jude for her inspiration and putting me on yet another path.

It is quite difficult to find suitable, old, worn cloth, but I realise I have to collect all my textiles and yarns in one spot – I seem to be endlessly looking for where I have stashed them – and since we moved they could be anywhere! I am using fabric dyed last year, snippets of my mother’s dressmaking, her box of embroidery threads, my threads from those I collected decades ago and even some old silk velvet from my sister’s mother in law. The cloth (dyed in tea) with the holes was an old pillowcase into which we used to put horse riding gear when it was being machine washed. The ‘something new’ is the print of the mallow plant growing in the new garden.

I really like the feel of the layers of cloth and the abstract forms created by the stitching on the reverse of the piece. The space created by the circle (top left) seems to suggest landscape, or a vista. It is the only part that has visual depth. What to do next…

Leaf Prints from Glentui Valley

By: Celia Wilson 3 November, 20143 November, 2014

Nature prints, New Zealand native plants, Prints, Uncategorized, Watercolour paintGlentui Valley, Nature printsLeave a Comment

I am starting out on a printmaking journey. I have a new press, new inks and new paper, so lots of experimentation and not a lot of resolved or finished work just yet. I do enjoy the discovery of new ideas and methods. I have been been printing with two good friends, Ruth Stanton McLeod, printmaker and Sue Alexander, jeweller and printmaker, for about two years now, but it is quite daunting doing it all by yourself!

So, to encourage my artist into action, I thought I would post a few prints for scrutiny by the wider world – a sort of critique session.

I had an ‘artist’s date’ in September when I visited Glentui Valley to walk a Department of Conservation bush track, with the idea that if fallen leaves presented themselves to me during the walk I could collect them up and take prints – eco prints on paper or nature prints perhaps.

The leaves in the nature print below are three finely veined makomako or wineberry leaves (Aristotelia serrata), a small fern and a whauwhaupaku (five-finger Pseudopanax arboreus) with only three leaflets, it had lost the other two. I like the way the plant juice pressed out from the whau has contributed to the print – even providing its signature. The print was made with water-based ink, and if I had used oil-based ink I could have coloured the leaves with my watercolour paints. The paper was dry Tiepolo, 290 gsm, the ink was Flint. I have also just started to print on a ‘premium digital ink jet’ paper, 100 gsm, which is acid free but not sure if that alone gives it art archival status. With oil- and water-based ink you get a really nice print on the smooth ink jet paper, and it dries well. Good for tests!

Glentui-leaves I also used the leaves collected at Glentui for a paper steam – some images needed further work. I added in colourful plants from the garden, to take advantage of the spring flowers.

Eventually, these images were made into a book which I have just completed. The book’s cover is paper from a much earlier nature printing session when leaf prints were applied onto a sheet of paper coloured by earth pigments (Waikari green and an oxide brown-red watercolour). The nature prints in the book were made using oil-based ink, and were added on top of the steamed ecoprints.

As an experiment for this book, I applied the Waikari green paint to the black beech leaves, a Winsor & Newton blue watercolour to the primula flower petals and above them a touch of Indian Yellow, and pencil outlines were used to define some other leaves and flowers. However, the pink and grey marks on some of the sheets of paper occurred as I left the damp paper between plastic for a few days… Mould, ie! There is also a lot of colour transfer from the plants themselves through to the adjacent pages of the stack as it was being steamed.

The last page shown here, of two wineberry leaves, is a steam of leaves I had previously used in a nature print – hence the black impressions appearing within the colours of the leaves.

A good way to record a walk and the progress in using my new etching press!

Steam and Solar Dyes – New Zealand Plants

By: Celia Wilson 12 February, 201312 February, 2013

Eco printing, New Zealand native plants, Pigments, Solar dyeingdyes, eco print, New Zealand plants, plants, silk cloth, solar dye3 Comments

In this post I collect together the New Zealand plants I have recently used in steam and solar dyeing.

Hebe species. Steamed bundles

Hebe flowers and leaves were laid out on opposite sides of two silk bundles, with hebe twigs for the core. After steaming the leaves produced yellow and the flowers a mix of blue and a grey-pink-brown as is shown in the smaller bundle below. Although as the silk used was already dyed a pale ‘salmon pink’, this background colour does not look very pink in the photograph…

Good colours, but not much definition of leaf or flower shape, and I still had the heat too high causing damage to the silk as you can see at the top the image above. The photograph below shows part of the larger piece of dyed white silk.

Beech Leaves – Nothofagus species. Solar dye

I placed the leaves in water in a large jar. No colour emerged, so I decided to simmer the leaves, but unfortunately damaged them by letting the water in the pot dry out…

In 1849, when the British settlement of Canterbury started in earnest, the area named Oxford by the early surveyors was covered by a large forest – Harewood Forest, which has been described as ‘the most magnificent stand of virgin bush in Canterbury and unique because of its variety. It originally covered 56,000 acres [22,662.40 ha] and was the magnet which attracted the sawmilling community from which the present town grew’ (Oliver A Gillespie, Oxford, the first hundred years). The forest was logged for timber for the growing settlement around Christchurch and was nearly destroyed in 1898 by a fire which swept through the area, fanned by the strong winds that occur in Canterbury. The last sawmill closed in 1912.

I will repeat the solar dye at some point, as I am lucky enough to have these trees growing in the garden. There are still clumps of the forest remaining close by – and we find seeds from these oases arrive via the birds and grow well in the undisturbed parts of the garden.

Kapuka – Griselinia littoralis. Solar dye

This tree is found in lowland and subalpine forest throughout New Zealand. Griselinea has small flowers, which are green in the female and yellow in the male plants, and the berries are black when ripe. For my test I used the green leaves which I cut up, and tied a knot in the alum pre-mordanted silk. The berries are now on the trees, and ripen from March to June.

Wharariki, New Zealand Mountain or Coastal Flax Plant – Phormium cookianum.

Steamed bundle and solar dye.

I think the flax plants in my garden are cultivars of P. cookianum. The leaves have distinct colours – either green, yellow, pink and orange, or in combination, each plant being different. The flowers are small and, characteristically for this plant, the seed pods hang downwards and are more or less twisted. Our flax plants have not flowered yet this year so I wonder if they flower every year. (See more details here : <http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/science/plants-animals-fungi/plants/ethnobotany/weaving-plants/information-sheets/harakeke-and-wharariki> )

This piece of silk started life as a steamed bundle containing a fallen Magnolia bud, but very little colour came from this (here the silk is still wet). Taking this silk I rolled up a new bundle containing just yellow flax leaf pieces and put it on to steam with the Hebe bundles mentioned above. The vein down the centre of the flax leaf left a good red mark on the silk.

Makomako or Wineberry – Aristotelia serrata. Steamed bundle and solar dye

The plant is found throughout New Zealand in lowland and subalpine forest, especially in clearings. The solar dye liquid has a sweet, wine-like smell.

Incorporated into a steam bundle of mixed flowers and leaves, were some Flax, Wineberry and Griselinea leaves, and Hebe flowers. The Wineberry leaves gave a good imprint. This is seen in the two images below. The purple-grey marks are from the leaves which are thin and translucent. (The pink in the background of the second image below is from hollyhock flowers.)

The berries, which are edible, are red when mature and black when ripe. I picked black berries and solar dyed the cotton shown below. The colour of the dye is very strong. This entry in my workbook is shared with a eucalyptus solar dye.

The Eucalyptus (I think it is blue dollar gum) shown above, leads nicely into my next post which I intend to be about my other solar dyes.

For information on the plants I referred to NZ Flowers and Plants in Colour by J. T. Salmon, edition published in 1986. Some of the plant nomenclature has changed since then, but I have used the current plant names. All plants come from the garden.