My Artist's Date : how to make paints from flowers and leaves

Last week was quite a busy week for me. It was full of family activities as well as of creative ones. I attended 2 live workshops and two online art challenges plus I'm practicing watercolor painting!

There are so many things happening in just one week and now I have stories to write on this blog for maybe 2 or 3 weeks :).  Let's begin with my latest Artist's Date. The Date was for a live workshop with a lovely artist who specializes in painting watercolor with organic paints, the ones that made from leaves of plants and trees and flower petals. Her name is Tongkarn Samathakorn and you can look at her beautiful work at Organic Water Color page.

The workshop was hosted by The Museum of Floral Culture in Bangkok where you can learn about plants, flowers and Thai culture related to flowers.

Here are some of beautiful flower displays around the museum.

The class was held in a small cozy little pavilion in the garden. We were introduced to various kinds of flowers and leaves that could be made into watercolor paints. 

You can make pink paint from Bougainvillea,  blue from Butterfly Pea, yellow from Night Jasmine, green from Pandanus leaves, and the list goes on. How to make it is very easy.  Begin by picking the petals off, put them in a mortar, add little bit of hot water and start grinding until you see the color comes out.

This method needs time and patience. The artist has devoted her time in experimenting until she finds the right paints for her paintings and here are her works all done in organic paints.

The artist has a lot of her paintings published in books and magazines but I have to tell you that the original paintings are much much more gorgeous than the printed ones. So happy to have a chance to see them :D

And here is my attempt of organic watercolor painting.

This workshop inspires me to begin my journey of watercolor practice. If you have been following my facebook page, you may have seen some of my paintings already. After some awkward moments in front of water and paints, I think I'm beginning to fall in love with watercolor painting and I will write about this lovely journey here soon :)

Thanks for coming. Hope you have a merry creative day today :)