Bleeding Narcissus

Here's my daffodil scan from the student art show. It's a composite of two of the scans of pressed flowers I made to gather images for Assignment 1. I did end up using the magnolia and forsythia in that assignment, but not these ones. There was a lesson learned there: it's a time commitment to cut out something as detailed as a flower! I really love how much detail the scanner captured. The original flowers were not very big, but you can see veins in the petals and tiny specks of mold in the big scan file.

The color in most of my pressed flowers fades very quickly. Blue, purple, and red often become undetectable or grey-brown in short order. Green will sometimes remain green or become an odd brown. In the case of magnolia flowers, delicate white turns dark brown in a matter of hours after pressing. This frailty of color seems to be less pronounced with yellow so I really like pressing the yellow flowers. Dandelions, forsythia, and daffodils do really well over the long term and usually end up bleeding the tenacious yellow all over the page.

 Bleeding Narcissus. Click to view a larger version.