Casting Flowers: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Beautiful Botanical Art

by Juliet Roberts

ISBN: 9781643263465

Published: 2025-05-15

Artist Rachel Dein introduces readers for the first time to botanical bas-relief, an innovative and exciting technique developed by the author, one that anyone--gardener, parent, weekend crafter, or artist--can try at home in every season. Casting Flowers introduces botanical bas-relief as a rewarding method that encourages even the most basic beginners to revel in the ability to record a plant's texture, pattern, and delicacy in fine detail, creating compositions as small as a single stem or as complex as a field of wildflowers, leaves, and grasses. Making a botanical cast is simple: the maker rolls out a slab of clay, and then flowers and foliage are arranged and pressed onto it. Once the plants are removed, a wooden frame is placed firmly on the clay and plaster is poured in and allowed to set. Once the plaster is dry, the clay is then peeled away, and the plaster cast is pushed out of its frame, revealing a cast of the plants in all their glory. Artists can leave a finished...