One of my favorite printmaking adventures is making nature prints--which means at any given time, there is likely a pile of dead flowers somewhere in my apartment waiting to be inked up. Somewhere, there's a sweet spot between freshly dead and too dry that they fall apart, and I've had some success / some failure in seeking that out. If they are too crumbly, I can still get them to work for some monotypes sometimes if not actual prints involving whole stems. I've been slowly working the past couple of years on a series of nature-inspired monotypes called night bloom, as well as an assortment of prints using flowers.
There are a number of techniques, which can vary depending on heartiness of the plant samples and the type of paper. Some are more traditional relief prints on printmaking paper, while others use the flowers more like a stamp between two sheets of paper. (I like a nice watercolor stock for these.) I'm hoping to get a chance to do another workshop with these in the fall in the library, so keep an eye out for details.
