Eco-printing on paper tutorial_ how to eco-print with a rusty can

In this video I'm going to demonstrate a simple method for eco-printing on paper. And for this you'll need some pieces of paper cut into long strips and you can use any kind of paper you have on hand. So you might use drawing paper or printing paper but I find I get much better results with watercolor paper because it's just a bit thicker and it's got a really beautiful texture. And today I'm using Arches brand of watercolor paper which has been sized with gelatin and the natural dyes in the plant bond really well with the gelatin so you get really nice bright results with this paper. But as I said you can just use anything you have on hand and see what happens. You'll also need some rusty tin cans to wrap the paper around and this is going to create a lovely dark background on the paper around all of our leaves. If you don't have rusty tins you can just use any cans that you have or you can take a few weeks to rust them. So to do this you need to lightly sand the surface of the tin with sandpaper and then submerge it in some watered down cleaning vinegar probably just for a couple of hours and then leave it out in the elements for a few weeks somewhere safe outside and you'll start to notice it rusting up and you can also speed this process up by re-submerging it a few times in the vinegar and then placing it outside again. You'll also need some string for tying the bundle up and you can use anything you have. I've just got these strips cut from old pieces of cotton sheet or you could use some kind of wool or thread. Just steer clear of any synthetic strings because you don't really want to be cooking these in a diapod and breathing in the fumes so just use something natural. And you'll also need some plant material of course. So I've got these geranium leaves to use because they tend to create really beautiful colours once they're combined with the rust. And I've also got a couple of my favourite eco-printing plants which give really reliable results on paper and cotton. So I've got Japanese maple and some rose leaves and some eucalyptus leaves. I've also got some fern leaves and even though these don't give colour themselves they're such a beautiful shape and once you put them on the paper and then put the rusty tin on top the rust will create a beautiful relief effect around the leaf so you'll get a lovely silhouette of this beautiful delicate leaf shape. And then I've got some red onion skin and some brown onion skin and this is to sprinkle over all the leaves before I wrap the bundle just to create a bit of extra colour because these are a really great source of natural dyes. So once you've collected all your materials you're ready to begin placing leaves onto the paper and it's always a good idea to place the back of the leaf facing down onto the paper because a lot more colour comes from the back of the leaf. And it can be really nice to overlap the different leaf shapes so that the colour can bleed between them and you get interesting layers of colours. And once you're happy with your leaf composition you can get some of the onion skins and just break them up slightly and sprinkle them all over. And like I said this will just help to add extra splashes of colour. And now we can roll the paper around the tin. So you might just need to slightly rearrange the position of your leaves as you wrap. And try to press quite firmly because it's a firm pressure of leaves on paper that will help you get really beautiful bright results. So I'm just going to press down on the paper and I'm going to get some really clear prints. And now I'm going to use a string to hold the paper in place. If your string is too long like mine is I can just wrap it around the edge to keep that away. I don't want to put too much string along the paper because I'm going to put this bundle into a dye bath and get some lovely dyed strips everywhere that the paper is showing. And a lovely resist effect underneath the string. So I'll just tie this extra string out of the way. So that's our first eco print bundle. Now I'll repeat the process with these remaining pieces of paper and these tins. I'm going to wrap two different pieces of paper around this tin so that we can see the difference between the layers that are really close to the rusty metal and the layers that are further out. These bundles are now ready to be cooked in the dye bath. So I've got my dye pot to put them in and you really do need a dedicated dye pot. Don't just use one from your kitchen because you don't want to cross contaminate this with something you use for cooking food. So you can just use an old cooking pot you have and then designate it as a dye pot or maybe try searching at a second hand store to get a cheap cooking pot that you can use. And because I've got a few leaves left over I'm just going to put those in to help provide colour. And I'll put the onion skin in too. And I'm even going to put in some extra onion skin because it is such wonderful colour. So now I'll top this with boiling water and then boil it for about an hour. So here's what our paper bundles look like after they've been cooked. You can see how the onion skin has created this beautiful brown colour on the exposed bits of paper. And I'm going to begin unwrapping the string so we can see what it looks like on the inside. Here's the resist lines that I talked about earlier caused by the string blocking the dye from touching some parts of the outside of this bundle. Before you get distracted by opening the bundle it's always a good idea to wrap up your string so that it doesn't get all tangled and knotted and then it's ready for next time you're going to do some eco printing. So the rose leaves have left some subtle patterns on the paper whereas the onion skin has left some really bright patches of orange. This is the piece that I did as a second layer. And you'll see how different it is to the piece that was touching the metal tin. There's some beautiful outlines around the fern leaves and these geranium leaves and some nice vein detail as well. And some of these maple leaves have gone really dark and these ones are a bit lighter. If any of your leaf material has stuck to the paper you can just gently coax it off by submerging it in some water and rubbing it really gently. This piece has some lovely dark outlines around the rose leaves and some of the dyed lines are showing through from the other side which is a really beautiful effect. My camera decided to stop recording while I was unwrapping the final bundle but here's how it has turned out and you can see that it's quite golden and that's because the tin that I wrapped around for this one was the one with the least amount of rust and quite golden rust so it's given a brighter and more subtle background to this print whereas for the other two bundles the rust was much darker and almost black and it's created black backgrounds and black outlines on these two prints. So that's a basic introduction to this simple method of eco-printing on paper. I hope you enjoyed it and if you give it a go please let me know in the comments.