Oshibana: pressed floral

The art of making a mistake (or oshibana, if youprefer the Polivanov system to the Hepburn system) originated in Japan about six hundred years ago (although there is evidence that the application of natural materials was used in different countries even earlier). By the way, the art of making a mistake in those days was "masculine" - pictures in this technique were created by samurai. In Europe, it was widespread in the Victorian era, and in the last thirty years, the mistaken is experiencing a second birth.

Oshabana is a kind of floristry, otherwise called pressed floral. To make paintings in the mistaken technique, leaves, flowers, grass, bark of trees, seeds, poplar fluff and other natural materials are used.

Before creating the picture, the materials are dried in a herbarium grid or under a press, and then attached to the substrate, creatingcomposition. Paper or cloth can serve as a basis. Sometimes the paper on which the composition is created is washed with watercolors to create a background.

Despite the apparent simplicity, oshibana is a kind of jewelry technique, allowing you to create stunning pictures. Masters, who create pictures in the technique of error, must take into account a lot of nuances, so that the picture turns out to be "as alive".

For example, leaves and flowers when dried, often change their color and shape. Therefore, people who are seriously engaged in pressed floristry, invent special methods of drying and processing plants, allowing you to save their color, shape and texture. Store plant material for oshibana in sealed containers away from direct sunlight.

Oshibana is an art that requires imagination, patience and accuracy. Professionally executed in technologypressed floristics, the picture can be difficult to distinguish from a painting painted with colors. Experienced masters can create trees from leaves, from petals - silhouettes of mountains, giving the finished picture the maximum resemblance to a real landscape or a still-life.

Finished paintings are mistaken over time can burn out and darken, so it is very desirable to insert them into the frame under the glass. In Japan they went further: the Japanese creators of the pictures are wrong pumped the air between the picture and the glass, the formed vacuum protects plants from spoilage.

If you decide to do art mistakenly, you need to acquire the necessary materials and tools. In addition to dried plants you will need: Adhesive, becoming transparent after drying (for example, PVA); Brushes and sticks for glue; tweezers; scissors with straight tips; a matting mat; stationery knife; dense cardboard.

Simple applications can be done without a sketch, and if you are planning a picture with a complex composition and an abundance of details, you must first draw a sketch with a simple pencil. You do not need to detail the sketch too much, the main thing is to carefully think over the composition of the future picture, harmoniously placing all the elements on the sheet space.

Oshabana is a kind of test of your artistic taste and sense of composition. It is very important to correctly determine the compositional center of the future application, correctly select the colors. Do not get carried away with small details: they are usually superfluous and only worsen the composition.

If the picture has a large area, glue the elements in a certain order: from the edges to the center. Do not hurry to glue the elements, first decompose them, leave them for a while, and then look at the composition with a "bland" look. Still like it? You can stick it!

Oshibana is real painting by plants. In this technique, you can create unusualpictures of stunning beauty. The charm is wrong in that you do not need to buy expensive materials: "raw materials" for the production of paintings are given to us by nature itself, so you can experiment as much as you like!