Can you make paint from flowers? Learn how to make watercolor paint using deadheaded flowers from your garden or other blooms foraged from nature.
Whenever I walk through my garden, I find something withered that needs pruning. Removing those “deadheads” makes room for new plant growth. Whether it’s a green weed or a colorful flower, Mother Nature demands constant turnover. Depending on which flowers I harvest, the deadheads can be fine additives to tea, handmade paper, or a batch of soap. But when the shriveled blooms still look robust with color and I’m feeling crafty, I use them to make biodegradable watercolor paints.
Why Make Paint from Flowers
You may think making your own watercolor paints isn’t worth the time and effort. Like other small-price consumables, such as homemade ketchup or butter, it’s easier to buy them at the store. But much like growing your own food, when you create and use your own paints, you become familiar with the ingredients and their origins, making yourself part of the product. Crafting your own watercolor palette and upcycling plant parts that would otherwise be discarded will help connect you to nature’s life cycle, especially if you make paint from flowers from your own garden.
The process will also connect you to peoples who came before. Plant-based textile dyes and inks have a long and storied history. Back before you could trek to the craft store for art supplies, every culture in every time period had methods of extracting pigments and dyes from things they found in nature. Native Americans made yellow paint from buffalo organs. Early Mayans made their trademark blue from indigo plants, clay, and resin. And many cultures, past and present, feature cochineal beetles in their red dyes for food and clothing (Red 4).
The process detailed in this article comes from painter and illustrator Janice Stefko, who since 2019 has taught students how to create their own natural watercolor paints through a class called Blooms to Brushstrokes. Her classroom in Chautauqua Institution’s Pier Building, nestled between the community rain gardens and the shores of upstate New York’s Chautauqua Lake (Zone 5b), provides an idyllic setting to learn this craft. Not only is the building surrounded with colorful flowers, but the afternoon and evening sun also turns the building into a natural oven, providing the heat needed for the chemical change necessary for the recipe to work.
Stefko’s journey into floral watercolors started in 2008 when she was in the garden with her children, showing them how to deadhead wilted flowers to make room for new plant growth. One of the blooms in her warm hand leeched its vibrant magenta color onto her palm. Although that was the “Aha!” moment that lit a fire inside her, she found very little information about how to create botanical paints appropriate as a fine art medium.
During the next several years, Stefko researched historical documents, and she performed her own pigment-extraction experiments. Her tests included 20 different flowers, 12 painting substrates (including linen, cotton, cellulose, and rice papers), and several different extraction and preservation techniques. The process below is her most successful test case, which allowed her to reliably and repeatedly extract pigments from flowers to use as a basis for how to make watercolor paint.
“Because I believe in this process so much and how it truly reconnects our souls with nature, at the same time allowing us to be joyful artists and stewards of the earth, I looked for ways to share the process with others,” Stefko says. The paints have the additional benefit of being free of toxins.
Upcycling Deadheaded Flowers
You can easily learn how to make watercolor paint from flowers using easy-to-find kitchen equipment and just a few inexpensive ingredients.
The process starts with foraging. Late summer is an ideal time, when summer floral gardens begin to fade, but if you can harvest even a small handful of blooms during other seasons, you’ll have enough to make paint. Edible flowers are best because of their high flavonoid content and lack of toxins. If you aren’t sure if a flower is edible, and therefore suitable for paint, take a moment to positively identify it before taking a chance. Plenty of apps, books, and online resources exist to help you identify plants.
Harvest only dead flowers. Although you’ll find richer colors in live flowers, there’s more than enough pigment in deadheaded flowers to make the recipe work. Leave the live flowers for the pollinators.
When you pull off the dead parts, try to leave three-quarters of the plant intact so the offshoot won’t have trouble regenerating. You can also look for fallen blossoms on the ground. Generally, the more robust your flowers, the richer your paint will look. Gather about a handful of each color.
Avoid white flowers; extracting white pigment from flower petals won’t yield white paint. Use the absence of color on the page to create white. Also, be careful of thorns, toxins, and insects while harvesting.
Choosing Flowers for How to Make Watercolor Paint
In much the same way our ancestors extracted a variety of beautiful colors from their immediate surroundings, this process of making homemade watercolor paints will test your foraging abilities, and it’ll take time. The all-important element of time is what makes this particular process different from other paint-creation methods that require heating through artificial means.
“Trying to force the process with excessive heat can result in saddened colors,” Stefko says. “I’ve found that allowing the pigments to quietly seep from the petals allows for a truer color.” This technique honors the process of nature, taking its due course without hurrying.
How to Make Watercolor Paint out of Flowers
Tools and Materials
- Empty plastic water bottles with caps, 1 per color
- Strainer
- Large measuring cup or other container with spout
- Watercolor palettes (if not available, a container with a shallow cavity will work; try a contact lens case or the lid of a pill bottle)
- Toothpick
- Foraged flowers, separated by color
- Warm water
- 1/2 teaspoon alum powder
- Gum arabic powder
These paints contain the flavonoids, anthocyanins, carotenoids, and chlorophylls extracted from the deadheaded organic matter. The result is a richly colorful watercolor paint that smells good too.
Repeat this process for different colored flowers to make a full set of paints. If you decide to mix flowers, use the same principles as mixing colors on the color wheel. Red and blue make purple, yellow and red make orange, and so on. If you mix too many contrasting flower colors, the result will likely be as brown as the community paint rinse cup.
Trying to create an exact color from floral leftovers takes trial and error. Each experiment is a new surprise. Stefko says, “If you’re looking for an exact science with a repeatable result, you won’t find it in this process.”
Note: Not only is alum great for gardening with certain live plants, but it’s also a common mordant used to dye fabrics, helping to disperse the pigments and attach them to the fibers. Alum is generally considered to be non-irritating to most people.
Gum arabic is harvested from species of Acacia trees. It’s been used for centuries as a binder in the production of watercolors, enriching the texture and brightness of the colors. You’ll use powdered gum arabic for this project, but you can also purchase it as bottled liquid and use it to paint.
Instructions
- Pull any green stems and leaves off your foraged buds. Set the green plant matter aside. You’ll use only the colorful bits for this recipe.
- Add the colorful buds to a water bottle. Pour enough warm water into the bottle to cover the buds.
- Add 1/2 teaspoon alum powder to the bottle, and, with the bottle cap on, shake the bottle for several minutes. Set the bottle in a warm location for 48 hours.
- After 48 hours have passed, set the strainer over the measuring cup. Then, pour the flowers and water through the strainer.
- Rinse the water bottle, and then pour the colored water back into the rinsed water bottle.
- Sprinkle gum arabic powder into the palette. Add droplets of colored water to the powder in a 1-to-1 ratio with the gum arabic. Mix with a toothpick. If the mixture feels thin, add more powder. If it gets too clumpy, add a little colored water.
- Let paint sit for 48 hours or more to solidify.
Originally published as “Craft Your Own Botanical Watercolors” in the August/September 2023 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
