Jacqui Symons forages, cultivates and uses plants to create colour for textiles, paper, printmaking and pigments. 

Created from a desire to be more environmentally-aware, buy and consume fewer products and generate less waste, She began exploring natural colour and dyes in 2018.  She researched and developed the use of plant-based pigments for oil-based printmaking inks and from there expanded into making her own watercolours, pastels, inks, screenprinting pastes and dry powdered pigments from plant sources.

In 2019, Jacqui trained under Jenny Dean to learn about the use of natural dyes with textiles and yarns, drawing on Jenny’s 40 years of experience in this field to develop further knowledge and understanding of this increasingly relevant and respected industry.

Jacqui created Slow Lane Studio to provide resources, information, practical advice and workshops focusing on natural dyeing, plant-based pigments and plant-based artist colours. Alongside working on creative projects and commissions, she is developing a pigment garden and a plant pigment library as a reference and resource for other artists.

Julie Beeler is an acclaimed designer, artist, and educator inspired by the natural world. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, Popular Science, The Smithsonian Institution and The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, among others.

Julie created the Mushroom Color Atlas website to unveil and celebrate the resplendent chromatic universe hidden within the fungi kingdom, making it accessible to people around the world. Her book The Mushroom Color Atlas, recently published by Chronicle Books, is a comprehensive  primer on the universe of colors lurking inside fungi. It is equal parts art book, field guide, and dye-making workshop. In every form her effort  is a timeless reference that will be used for years to come. 

After a 20-year career at the vanguard of interactive design, Julie founded Bloom & Dye, a natural dye studio and farm in the Pacific Northwest ideally situated for foraging mushrooms, growing fresh-cut color, and creating fine art.

Greta Desirèe Facchinato (IT/LU) is a research-based multidisciplinary artist and designer. She holds a Masters in Artistic Research from KABK Den Haag (NL) and a Batchelors in Visual and Performance Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (IT). Through the crossflow of different mediums and the investigation of daily life encounters, gestures, and materials her practice invites us to experience matter from an embodied awareness. She runs a studio focused on research and sustainable education through natural materials, illustration and creative workshops. In 2021 with her project Colour is Alive she researched organic ink making for screen printing. Since then she is been working with the knowledge of color and the interconnection with our environment through the practice of making sustainable ink for printing techniques.

Caroline Ross is an artist, writer and teacher living by the sea in Bournemouth. Her debut book ‘Found and Ground: A Practical Guide to Making your own Foraged Paints’ was published by Search Press in June 2023. She is writing the follow up about ancient and foraged drawing materials, ‘Drawn From the Wild’ to be published spring 2025. Using what nature provides and repurposing what humans discard are a large part of her practice. After the rooks have feasted on the riverbank, the empty mussel shells become paint palettes. The seasonally moulted flight feathers of local swans and geese become quill pens and brushes. Chalk dug out from their setts by badgers is left in piles in the woods, where she gathers it and take it home to make gouache. Caroline makes paints from foraged earth pigments from around the UK, and art tools and inks from natural, wild, and found materials such as oak galls, rusty nails, elderberries, bay leaves and cherry tree gum. The natural fluctuations of materials and the botanical ink stains or ochre paints forming prepared grounds on paper, all suggest forms with which she works.

Winona Quigley grew up in Lancaster Pennsylvania. After moving to New York to attend Parsons School of Design and working with a variety of fashion houses, she began to develop a body of natural dye research which sparked the development of Green Matters Natural Dye Company. She returned to Lancaster to open a dye house that offers plant based commercial dye services to fashion brands as an alternative to synthetic dye, which has an outsized impact on global waterways. In 2021, she was listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 in the Manufacturing and Industry category. As of today, Green Matters’ clients include Chipotle Mexican Grill, Alex Mill, and Stitch Fix.

Natalie Stopka is an artist and educator focused on the material history of color and sustainable studio practice. She captures material and elemental interactions in her collaborative, experimental art practice. Her drawings and prints incorporate plant dyes and historical pigments, which provide a seasonally evolving vocabulary of texture and color. Natalie’s freelance studio and dye garden are located in Yonkers, New York. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Flora is a natural colour maker, forager, illustrator, designer, and online learning enthusiast. She lives on the western edge of Dartmoor, where she grows, forages, and makes colour. She loves to experiment with making dye, print, and drawing materials for textiles and paper, developing new recipes and testing out plants. Her work is about place based natural colour making, and education. She is passionate about making plant based colour application processes for textiles and paper more accessible through online courses and events on this website as well as programming guest teachers on her learning platform plantsandcolour.com. Encouraging you to work with locally available plants to make vibrant and enduring colours for craft, art, and design practices.