More Gyotaku… sorta

Aug 18, 2014
By stlukesattic
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Gyotaku literally means “fish rubbing” in Japanese. So what I have here isn’t exactly gyotaku properly speaking; it’s more like plant-taku. (All of this taku talk is making me think of gyotacos, which would be delicious right now… a little of that sour cream-type sauce that my wife makes with some cabbage over some seasoned grilled tilapia all wrapped in a warm tortilla. Have a little dirty rice on the side. Mmmmm.) Anyway, I have made some plant prints from some of the trees growing just outside of the school where I teach.

This first one is an oak sprout. These are harder to do than you would think. At least they were for me. I had to fiddle around with the pressure on the press so that it was high enough to get a good, clean print, but not so high that it crushed the stem and sent plant juices squirting all over the paper. I tried hand printing as an alternative, but I could not get any good impressions that way. I’ll just have to keep trying.

Here I tried to approximate the colors in the leaves from the oak twig I picked for this one:

And this one. Hmm. A lot of people smile and say “weed!” for this one. But it’s actually a leaf from a castor bean plant. It’s towering over the school garden where no one seems to remember planting it. And don’t worry, I’ve done due diligence on researching just exactly how poisonous this plant is and the internet assures me that we’re all safe.