Dyeing Paper With Natural Colour
With Radha Pandey, and Jacqui Symons
Four Weekly Live Online Sessions October 2027
We’ll start with guiding you to select types of paper that will maximise your potential for success, then look at how to prepare paper, including sizing and mordanting, so the results stay bright and hold up over time.
From there we’ll mix and manage dye baths that give deep, even colour, working both by immersion and with brush dyeing for more direct control.
Pattern comes next, exploring orizome, different resist methods, smooth ombré shifts, and colour modifiers to nudge shades warmer, cooler, darker, or clearer.
We will look at paper dyeing with an indigo vat, as well as brush dyeing, sharing the approaches that work best.
Across the sessions you will be exposed to a variety of methods, so you can consider how you would like to approach paper dyeing in your own work.
Along the way we will pay close attention to how paper behaves differently from fabric dyeing, why some papers suit certain techniques better than others, which plant dyes work best with paper, and how working with indigo opens up a distinctive range of blue tones, and how over dyeing can open a wider spectrum of colours.
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In this demo, participants will learn which mordants work best with paper and why.
We will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages as well as how to prepare and apply these to paper.
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This session will introduce participants to the techniques and processes that can be used to dye paper. Jacqui will demonstrate dyeing paper using both brush and immersion techniques, how to achieve strong colours, how to prepare and make dye baths for dyeing paper and how to achieve flat and uniform results on sheets of paper.
She will highlight the differences between dyeing paper and dyeing fabric, discuss the best papers to dye with natural colour and also talk about materials and equipment used in paper-dyeing. The session will be a combination of live talk and pre-recorded content to show some longer processes.
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This session will progress beyond merely dyeing paper using immersion and brush techniques to explore the introduction of pattern, colour modification, using hombre effects and other ways to colour paper.
Jacqui will demonstrate the use of colour modifiers and different techniques to achieve pattern with them, resist and orizome methods and two-tone / hombre dyeing. The session will be a combination of live talk and pre-recorded content to show some longer processes.
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This session will introduce how to make an indigo dye vat that is well-suited to dyeing paper and pulp.
We will go over the best way to dye pulp, as well as dip dye paper, discuss paper types best suited to dipping into indigo and tips and tricks for colour saturation. We will also make a paste that can be brush onto sheets.
Dyeing Paper
With Natural Colour
Four Live Online Demonstrations
Access 8 hours of teaching (Join live or watch the recordings)
Printable Handouts
Access to recordings for one year: Until November 2028
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Mordanting Paper
With Radha Pandey
In this demo, participants will learn which mordants work best with paper and why. We will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages as well as how to prepare and apply these to paper.
Tuesday 5th October 4-5.30pm GMT
With Radha Pandey
In this demo, participants will learn which mordants work best with paper and why. We will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages as well as how to prepare and apply these to paper.
Tuesday 5th October 4-5.30pm GMT
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Brush & Immersion Dyeing
With Jacqui Symons
Jacqui will demonstrate dyeing paper using both brush and immersion techniques, how to achieve strong colours, how to prepare and make dye baths for dyeing paper and how to achieve flat and uniform results on sheets of paper. She will highlight the differences between dyeing paper and dyeing fabric, discuss the best papers to dye with natural colour and also talk about materials and equipment used in paper-dyeing.
Tuesday 12th October 4-6pm GMT
With Jacqui Symons
Jacqui will demonstrate dyeing paper using both brush and immersion techniques, how to achieve strong colours, how to prepare and make dye baths for dyeing paper and how to achieve flat and uniform results on sheets of paper. She will highlight the differences between dyeing paper and dyeing fabric, discuss the best papers to dye with natural colour and also talk about materials and equipment used in paper-dyeing.
Tuesday 12th October 4-6pm GMT
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Developing Your Work
With Jacqui Symons
This session will progress beyond merely dyeing paper using immersion and brush techniques to explore the introduction of pattern, colour modification, using hombre effects and other ways to colour paper. Jacqui will demonstrate the use of colour modifiers and different techniques to achieve pattern with them, resist and orizome methods and two-tone / hombre dyeing.
Tuesday 19th October 4-6pm GMT
With Jacqui Symons
This session will progress beyond merely dyeing paper using immersion and brush techniques to explore the introduction of pattern, colour modification, using hombre effects and other ways to colour paper. Jacqui will demonstrate the use of colour modifiers and different techniques to achieve pattern with them, resist and orizome methods and two-tone / hombre dyeing.
Tuesday 19th October 4-6pm GMT
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Indigo Dyeing
With Radha Pandey
This session will introduce how to make an indigo dye vat that is well-suited to dyeing paper and pulp.
We will go over the best way to dye pulp, as well as dip dye paper, discuss paper types best suited to dipping into indigo and tips and tricks for colour saturation. We will also make a paste that can be brush onto sheets.
Tuesday 26th October 4-5.30pm GMT
With Radha Pandey
This session will introduce how to make an indigo dye vat that is well-suited to dyeing paper and pulp.
We will go over the best way to dye pulp, as well as dip dye paper, discuss paper types best suited to dipping into indigo and tips and tricks for colour saturation. We will also make a paste that can be brush onto sheets.
Tuesday 26th October 4-5.30pm GMT
Radha Pandey
Radha Pandey is a book artist, papermaker and letterpress printer. She earned her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She specializes in Indo-Islamicate Papermaking and teaches book arts classes in India, Europe and the US.
Her book Anatomia Botanica (2014) won the MICA Book Award and received an Honorable Mention at the 15th Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design. In 2018, her book Deep Time won the Joshua Heller Memorial Award. Pandey’s most recent book Flora of Mughal India won the prestigious MCBA Book Prize (2024).
Her books are held in over 80 collections internationally, including the Library of Congress and Yale University. She runs a book arts studio in India and Norway with her partner, Johan Solberg.
Currently, Radha is working on a book about shadows and our perception of the colour black.
Jacqui Symons
Jacqui is an artist, printmaker and natural colour researcher who responds to the environment and our natural world, with a focus on detail and intimacy. Her work explores concerns about climate change and the loss of nature and biodiversity, attempting to balance an appreciation for Earth’s beauty with a more serious message of irreversible damage. She concentrates on asking audiences and the people she works with to notice natural miracles, to appreciate the often unseen or small spectacle and rediscover the wonder of nature.
Since 2020, Jacqui has worked exclusively with natural colour and eliminated the use of synthetic art materials from her practice, using natural colour as both a material and a means of encountering place. She is increasingly interested not only in the colours themselves, but in what the processes of gathering, making and working with them asks her to notice: a particular plant, its habitat, seasonality, history, names, descriptions and the knowledge held around it. In 2025, she published her first book ‘From Plant to Print’ with Crowood Press Ltd.