Living Color
Workshops
These workshops are an invitation to slow down, work with your hands, and explore the color already living around us. Together we'll work with locally grown and gathered plants, seasonal blooms, food waste, and other natural materials, learning processes that are rooted in curiosity rather than perfection. My hope is that you leave not only with something you've made, but looking at the natural world around you a little differently.
all available workshops
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Date: Saturday, September 19th
Time: 5-7:30pm
Where: That Feeling Co on Dowling
Address: 1721 E Dowling Road
Anchorage, AK 99507
A 2.5-hour workshop exploring how to make, experiment with, and paint using color from nature.
I am a fine artist creating abstract paintings using only natural inks and pigments. I have been working with natural color for almost a decade, spending a lot of that time foraging, experimenting, and slowly fine tuning my own recipes and techniques. My interest in sustainable art practices comes from a deep love and care for the land, and from finding ways to preserve and celebrate its beauty through art and creativity.
One of the things I love most about natural ink is that you never completely know what you're going to get. The same plant can give you a different color depending on when you gather it, how you extract it, or what you add to it. Flowers, berries, leaves, roots, and even scraps headed for the compost can hold really surprising colors.
During this workshop, I'll share what I've learned through years of making and painting with natural inks and we'll make one together from start to finish using locally foraged Alaska blueberries. We'll extract the color, turn it into a usable ink, and experiment with how much that one color can change through pH shifts and modifiers. I'll also share my recipe for a natural binder and talk about the ways I preserve and store the inks I make.
We'll have an array of inks to work with made from locally grown flowers, natural dyes, food waste, and foraged materials. We'll explore different color families, see how they react to pH and modifiers, and create our own color palettes as we go.
We'll spend the second half of the workshop painting. I'll demonstrate some of the techniques I use in my own work, including washes, layering, mark making, transparency, and letting different inks interact on the paper.
We'll finish with locally grown seasonal blooms arranged on the table and use them as the subject for our paintings. Think of it loosely as a still life, but the goal isn't to perfectly paint the flowers in front of you. We'll use their shapes, movement, colors, and little imperfections as a starting point and see where the materials take us.
Natural ink has taught me to give up a creative control. The colors change, react, fade, and sometimes do something completely different than I expected. That's a big part of why I still love working with them after all these years.
I hope you leave with the confidence to keep experimenting with natural color on your own, and maybe looking a little differently at what’s already growing and changing around you. Flowers at the end of their season, berries along a trail, fallen leaves, kitchen scraps, or something growing right outside your door can all become materials for making.
All materials will be provided, along with light refreshments to enjoy while we create.
No painting or ink-making experience is needed. Come curious and ready to experiment.
Date: Sunday, September 20th
Time: 5-7:30pm
Where: That Feeling Co on Dowling
Address: 1721 E Dowling Road
Anchorage, AK 99507
A 2.5-hour workshop exploring natural color and the beautiful ways plants can leave their color behind on silk.
I am a fine artist and have been working with natural color for almost a decade, both in my paintings and through natural dyeing. I've spent years foraging, experimenting, and fine tuning the ways I extract, shift, and preserve color from plants. So much of this practice comes from my love and care for the land and wanting to create in a way that feels connected to it.
During this workshop, we'll each make two naturally dyed silk scarves, using two different techniques to explore how natural color can move, shift, and show up differently on silk.
I'll share how I prepare fabric for natural dyeing, including scouring and mordanting, how different natural fibers take color, and the ways I work with dyes, mordants, and modifiers. We'll use locally grown seasonal flowers, foraged plants, food waste, and natural dye materials while playing with color, placement, and composition.
We'll make our first scarf together so you can learn the process from start to finish. For the second, you'll have more freedom to work with a different technique and create something completely your own.
Once our scarves are wrapped and tied, we'll steam the bundles to release and transfer the color from the plants into the silk. Then comes my favorite part: opening them up. Some flowers leave incredibly clear impressions, while others bleed, soften, overlap, or reveal colors you never would have expected. No two pieces ever come out the same.
You'll leave with two completely one-of-a-kind silk scarves, each one almost like a little heirloom of this season. Something you get to wear, keep, and be reminded of the beauty and color nature gives us.
All materials, botanicals, and two silk scarves are provided, along with light refreshments to enjoy while we create.
No previous dyeing experience is needed. Come curious and ready to experiment.