First Attempt At Leaf Printing

Leaf Printing
Preparation

I started by having a walk around the campus and picking up a couple of leaves that interested me and are large enough to print a receipt onto.

The reason for wanting to print a receipt onto the leaf is because during the tutorial with Jessica Longmore, we talked about the piece I am currently doing which is the categorization or receipts and how I can relate this to my other ideas towards nature. The idea of printing receipts came from how humans try to control nature and how we are becoming distant from the natural environment and steering more towards consumerism and mass production.

Once I had picked a couple of leaves I wanted to work with, I dried them off quickly with a hairdryer and then put a thin layer of varnish on both sides to seal the leaf:

This is what I applied on both sides of the leaf to make sure it is a bit stronger for the next step of the process.

I was thinking of ways in order to print onto a leaf and I thought about putting it through a printer!

I started by scanning a receipt into my computer and then aligning it up with the position I would like it to be printed onto my leaf.

In order to put the leaf through the printer I had to experiment by placing the leaf of an A4 piece of paper with small dots of blue tac to make sure the corners are down so that it will feed through smoothly.

Unfortunately, it didn't work and nearly got stuck within my printer so I had to take it out quickly.

Although it was a fail, for the next attempt I was thinking about using glue and trying to transfer the image off the receipt onto the leaf!