Printing The Making of Florilegium Solmentes

A sheet from The Making of Florilegium Solmentes: Nature prints & digital Flowers that will accompany ten sets of the portfolio; twenty copies will be offered for sale separately.

The book includes eight original prints from leaves, (two with watercolour washes). It describes how the digital flowers were created using image-editing software and how the geometry of the flower led to some interesting diversions into the world of mathematics, optical illusions and pattern making.

Florilegium Solmentes is a portfolio of unique ‘digital’ flower prints created from ‘nature prints’ of leaves, from scanned petals and from other parts of plants found on our farm near Decorah in northeast Iowa. Some flowers are wholly imaginary, others are loosely based on real specimens.

Gazania "talent"

Another gazania flower created using the coneflower petal and center, a companion to:

Flax flower evolution

The colouring of the "flax flower" above is loosely based on a rock rose, genus Helianthemum of the family Cistaceae, in this case H. mummularium (common rock rose) of which there are many cultivars. Looking more like a zebra tomato, it does not have the papery petals of the rock roses as these are based Linum narbonense an ornamental species of flax. It was the third flower created in the flax series.



It evolved from a scanned petal of an evening primrose (Oenothera) made in July 2009.



The aim was to create a five-petalled flax flower so modifcation began in Photoshop. By changing the hue and saturation of the yellow petal, adding selective color changes and gradient overlays to achieve the basic "flax blue", the petal shape was cut and further modified:



Deep blue and yellow versions were also created



The following modifications were made and then "layered" to create the red petals based on the colouring of the rock rose:








For the center of the flower I used the spiny paleae of the purple coneflower (Echinacea purpuuria) a genus of the Asteraceae family and native of North America.



The yellow center is a modified version of one scanned last summer (above right).

Thank you KS for asking how they were made (see http://solmentes.blogspot.com/2010/03/flax-and-zebra-tomato-flowers.html).

Repeat patterns

How many units are repeated? Answer: thirty-two (8 x 4). As the pattern is repeated, new patterns emerge and it develops a new dynamic. Click to see a larger version in a new window.

Flax and zebra tomato flowers

A bed of flowers

This random display of "flax flowers" leads me to think about fabric designs. Changing the hue/saturation of the master pattern is easy to do in Photoshop. What hasn't been done is the alignment of the edge details, so tiling these patterns would yield a rectangular grid rather than an overall blanket effect. Let me see if I can do that, meanwhile here are some other colourways:





The Zebra tomato flax flower

Starting with the traditional blue flax flower this strange hybrid evolved. The individual flower resembles a Zebra heirloom tomato.

Fireflower

Fireflower

Working again on the Florilegium, mostly editing the text for the accompanying book but also being sidetracked by the Bradbury story (see previous post). I will create another dozen flowers to finish the project and this "Fireflower" is a possible candidate. Using a photograph of a neighbour's burning field as the background to the leaf lends another dimension to the image.

Still searching for the flower that "pulls" you in with an extraordinary and exotic centre, such as the tulips have. Although it is now March, here in Iowa, there is still snow on the ground and it will be some time before we see any new plants, let alone flowers.

stockhausen #4

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Working on a smaller scale – approximately 200 x 150 mm (8 x 6 inches), the actual size of the detail above is 63 x 38 mm (2.5 x 1.5 inches).


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stockhausen #3

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Adding watercolour and opaque white to the palette of acrylic inks.

Pondering how to represent the time/space/linear nature of a musical piece. The appeal of one or two bars of music or a group of phrases is that the main visual forms are limited in number. I have in mind to make a book of images, the pages of which can be turned in time with the music, like a score. The images will also be displayed in linear sequence and as frames in a video.


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Stockhausen #2

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Listening to Laura Ruiz Ferreres playing In Freundschaft on: Werke für Klarinette solo (2009), Dreyer Gaido CD 21049

Stockhausen In freundschaft – introduction

In Freundschaft: study002

Began work yesterday on the Stockhausen project, based on 'In Freundschaft' for solo clarinet. It will be interesting to see where this goes . . .

Twitter has a surprising and amusing pedigree

Nature-printed by Henry Bradbury

I am currently working on my text to accompany 'Florilegium Solmentes', a project inspired in part by Roderick Cave's forthcoming book Impressions of Nature. In this fascinating and comprehensive history of nature printing an unexpected topic arises – plagiarism. In his chapter 'Industrial espionage: the case of Henry Bradbury', Cave introduces an unfortunate pioneer of 'nature-printing' in nineteenth-century England.

Bradbury's father was a partner in Bradbury and Evans, printers and publishers of Punch and Charles Dickens among others, as well as some noteworthy volumes of nature printing. One of these was the four-volume Nature-printed British Sea-weeds, by William Grosart Johnstone and Alexander Croall, 'Nature-printed' by Henry Bradbury. Completed in 1860, the editors pen a lively Preface to the final volume:

'The quaint old writers of the sixteenth century were wont to chat sunnily and lovingly, through page upon page of "Preface" addressed to the "Courteous Reader," or "Kind Reader," or "Honored Reader," or, kindliest and gentlest of all, to "Dear Hearts," until he had been as the stone who went not with a "God bless you" to the perusal of the book so goldenly, and not without spice of wit and wisdom, and deftest deprecation, introduced. Alas! that the days of such "linkëd sweetness, long drawn out" in Prefaces, are vanished; and doubly alas! that no Elia! no Robert Southey of "The Doctor," has written their epicedium. And yet the Editors of "The British Algae." on concluding (for the time) their Book, feel greatly inclined to imagine the clock-of-time put back a couple of centuries, and to gossip and chat in old style with their "Courteous," "Kind," "Honored" Readers and "Dear Hearts" as in olden time. . . . Ah! thou "Athenaeum" critic how could'st thou flout and sneer against lily-handed maidens so daintily occupied as were the gentle constituents of "The British Algae!" Fie! fie! And, most erudite "Athenaeum" critic, in thy twitting of our letter press as too scientific, thou forgettest three things . . .'

This discovery of the word 'twitting' led me to the OED to find that twitter, has been in use since the fourteenth century: Chaucer, Boeth. III. met. ii. 54 (Camb. MS.) The Iangelynge bryd . . . enclosed in a streyht cage . . . twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.' Perhaps this gives a little more resonance to the plethora of tweets.

Returning to Bradbury, the young man was a member of the The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and the Royal Institute of Great Britain and frequently addressed both institutions. He was a vigorous proponent of electrotyping and 'his' nature-printing techniques, stolen, it appears from Alois Auer and the k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei in Vienna. I propose to publish Henry Bradbury's talks and the lively correspondence that ensued before he took his own life by drinking prussic acid on 2 September 1860. He was twenty-nine years old.

Nature-printed by Henry Bradbury