Colour from carrot tops and eucalyptus leaves

In a converted garage tucked behind a weatherboard cottage in Sydney's inner west, Aria Mendel runs a small intaglio press the colour of old honey. She pulls a sheet of cotton rag paper through the rollers and a soft ochre cloud of gum leaves blooms onto the page. The pigment is one she boiled down from red gum and spotted gum foliage gathered on a morning walk along the Glebe foreshore, and it sits inside a practice built entirely around plants.

Aria is part of a growing movement of Australian printmakers quietly rethinking one of the oldest materials in their craft. Rather than reach for tubes of commercial pigment, she forages, simmers, strains and reduces her own dyes from kitchen scraps and bush botanicals. The result is a slow, oddly domestic kind of printmaking in which dinner leftovers become colour and a Sunday walk through the park becomes the start of an edition.

From greasy pot to print plate

The first time Aria tried to make ink from onion skins she nearly gave up. The skins sat in a saucepan of rainwater for an afternoon, looked promising, and then refused to fix onto the paper. Without a mordant, the colour washed back into the soak and bled until the line was a sad bruise. A maker friend in Adelaide tipped her off to alum and a touch of vinegar, and the result was a copper red that has since become one of her signature shades.

She now keeps a battered enamel pot on a single gas burner and treats the kitchen like a small dye works. Avocado pits give a dusty rose. Red cabbage produces a blue that shifts toward lilac depending on the alkalinity of the water. Wattle blossoms, which flower across the coastal scrub of New South Wales in late winter, yield a soft sulphur yellow that holds up surprisingly well under the press.

The foraging map of an Australian studio

Aria's pantry reads less like a kitchen cupboard and more like a field guide. Jars of dried marigold petals sit beside bags of black walnut husks collected from a neighbour's tree in Newtown. A freezer drawer holds tightly labelled containers of spinach and silverbeet earmarked for a particular batch of green that works well over hand-cut lino.

Different climates across the country offer different raw materials. In Brisbane, the subtropical gardens and street-side mango trees have become a quiet resource for makers experimenting with tannin-rich leaves and stones. In Hobart, the cooler months pull the reds and ochres from native pepper berries and beetroot into sharper territory. Melbourne farm crates at the Queen Victoria Market in autumn arrive heavy with curing onions, an easy source of skins for any studio that can be patient.

How plant inks stack up on the press

A useful comparison for newcomers is the difference between a jar of foraged pigment and a tube of manufactured ink. The short table below summarises the trade-offs that come up most often in Australian studios.

Property Plant and vegetable inks Commercial synthetic inks
Pigment source Foraged leaves, kitchen scraps, bark, flower heads Manufactured pigments, often petroleum derived
Colour range Softer and more variable between batches Wide and consistent across batches
Lightfastness Mixed, depends on plant and mordant Generally rated high for archival work
Cost per batch Low once a routine is in place, but labour intensive Higher upfront, lower time investment
Environmental footprint Minimal packaging, biodegradable waste Plastic tubes, chemical solvents, heavy transport
Working properties on press Shorter open time, can behave unevenly Predictable, long open time, designed for press work

The lines are not as fixed as the table makes them appear. Mordants, paper choice and humidity all shift the working properties, and that variability is often what draws makers to plant-based pigment in the first place.

Inside a studio built for experimentation

The studio is small, deliberate, and filled with a side light that Aria treats as a third tool. There is the press, a drying rack strung with cotton tape, a tray of old copper plates and a folding table covered with the evidence of recent trials. Stained paper towels dry beside jars of strained liquid, and a small notebook logs each batch by date, plant, water source and mordant.

She prints in editions of twelve or fewer, partly because the ink behaves differently each time and partly because every sheet feels like a record of a particular afternoon. A run of monotypes using red cabbage might come out cool and grey on a humid day, then shift to a clear violet when a southerly buster moves through the city and dries the air. Buyers tend to respond to that variability rather than resist it, particularly those who collect work from Paddy's Markets in Haymarket or small galleries in Surry Hills. She has begun running weekend workshops out of a community hall in Marrickville, where beginners learn to mix a usable ink in a single day.

Workshops, markets and the slow spread of a practice

The work travels further than Aria does. Editions have ended up in the flat files of small regional galleries and in the hands of designers who want a patina that cannot be manufactured. Locally she shows at pop-ups in Carriageworks and at slow art fairs along the NSW south coast, where weekend crowds are unusually receptive to a conversation about how a colour was actually made.

For makers curious about the broader handmade imperatives of small studios, the how a photographer built a darkroom in a closet and never looked back piece sits in a similar world of patient, self-built craft and rewards a slow read. Both practices treat the limits of a small room as an invitation to invent rather than an obstacle.

In Melbourne she will be a guest at a print fair at the end of the year, running a short masterclass on identifying local dye plants. The waiting list is already longer than the room can hold.

The carbon question and quieter logistics

Switching from commercial ink to foraged pigment is not, on its own, a complete environmental statement. Aria is candid about the other costs. Paper arrives in plastic wrapping, copper plates wear out, and the press itself is a heavy piece of cast iron that had to travel to the studio in the first place. Even the paper is being reconsidered, and a new batch of cotton rag stock from a regional Victorian mill is heavier than the imported sheets she used to buy, but takes vegetable ink more willingly and arrives in unbleached cardboard.

Printmakers thinking through the full footprint of their practice often end up examining travel and supply runs as carefully as pigment sources. Regional pop-ups at places like the Salamanca Market in Hobart or the Fremantle Arts Trail in Western Australia can mean hauling fragile prints across long, dry corridors. For those drives, and especially heading into the colder months around the Snowy Mountains, a careful look at something like a guide to choosing the right winter tyres for an SUV ends up being part of the same conversation about dependable, low impact transport. Small differences, quietly stacked, are starting to feel like a real practice rather than a stylistic choice.

Plants currently in rotation in the studio

Where the ink ends up