Upcoming Learning Opportunities

Botanical Pigments for Paint, Ink, and Pastels

Sanborn Mills Farm
Loudon, New Hampshire
August 13-17, 2025

Artwork is made manifest with material choices. Join Natalie Stopka for a five-day exploration of beautiful and sustainable botanical pigments from our dye garden. These rich and subtle colors require thoughtful gathering and careful processing, rooting our practice in conversation with the natural world. Starting with a harvesting excursion, we’ll discuss how to grow, process, and store dye sources. We’ll then extract those dye colors and transmute them into shelf-stable lake pigments and indigo powder. We’ll discuss the chemistry controlling vibrancy and opacity and learn to adapt our basic recipe to participants’ local home garden plants (and weeds!). The ink, pastels, and hand-mulled watercolors we create will color gestural botanical ‘portraits’ of our plant collaborators. Participants will leave with 5+ pigments and 3+ watercolors, inks, and pastels to fold into their own studio practice, as well as the technical know-how to make their own botanical pigments and natural artists’ materials. No previous experience is required.

Skills and Techniques:

  • Ethical foraging guidelines, harvesting, and storage of dye plants

  • How to extract, precipitate, and wash lake pigments

  • Chemistry for artists: the basic chemical underpinnings of lake and indigo pigments

  • Mordant and alkali choices to control lightfastness, vibrancy, and opacity

  • Fermentation extraction of indigo pigment for Maya blue

  • How to make watercolor paints, pigmented writing inks, and pastel sticks for works on paper

  • Riveting stories from the history and artistry of pigment manufacture! From pre-Columbian ritual, through the medieval scriptorium and early modern alchemist’s laboratory, up to the present day

Natural Dyes from Garden Plants

Oak Spring Garden Foundation
Upperville, VA
August 18-22, 2025

Delve into the rich and subtle colors of natural dyes from garden plants. This short course is a special opportunity to work with plants grown on-site at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation's Biocultural Conservation Farm. Connecting the heritage of textile artisanry to sustainable studio practice, together we’ll:

  • Harvest fresh dye plants 

  • Learn the best practices of fiber preparation for both vegetable and animal fibers

  • Extract and apply color to a rainbow of swatches

  • Demystify mordants and address the all-important question of longevity 

  • Create an indigo vat for celestial blue

We’ll discuss the home cultivation of dye plants, dye studio set-up, safety considerations, and explore the colorful history of natural dyes. All fibers and dyes will be provided for a mini swatch library. Participants are welcome to bring one additional pre-washed skein or yard of natural fiber for a personal project (up to 100g). Students are also asked to bring their preferred gardening gloves and plant shears, and wear clothing that can get messy. Apply by May 12.

Printing & Painting on Textiles

With Natural Colour
A yearlong series hosted by Plants & Colour
starting in January, 2026

Learn a wealth of different approaches to printmaking and painting on textiles using natural colour in this new yearlong, online series. Taught by Natalie Stopka, Greta Facchinato, Caroline Ross, Julie Beeler, Winona Quigley, and Jacqui Symons, sharing different techniques for making patterns and prints on fabric that are light-fast and wash-fast. Sessions include:

  • Making a Start: orientation, studio setup & intention setting

  • Soya for Dyeing and Mordant Painting

  • Soya Binder or Topcoat for use with pigments

  • Making a Printing Ink Paste from natural dyes

  • Making a Printing Ink Paste from pigment/extract

  • Screen Printing Pattern with natural ink

  • Applying Ochre Glue Paint & Tannin Inks for fabric and leather surfaces

  • Fabric Printing with Mushroom Paints

  • Mordant Printing: Create color & pattern in a single dye pot

  • Mordant Painting with Mushroom Dyes

  • Natural Black Mordant for printing, painting & eco printing

  • Resist Pastes for immersion dyeing & direct print paste for semi-resist effects

  • Reflections & Sharing

Learn more about the instructors, format, optional study groups and mentoring through the link below!

Lake Pigment Making

Deep Dive
A yearlong series hosted by Plants & Colour
starting in January, 2026

A new year-long online programme exploring the concepts and chemistry of lake pigments following a historical trajectory from ancient Egyptian recipes, to medieval approaches, and modern-day techniques. Taught by Natalie Stopka, Lucy Mayes, and Julie Beeler in monthly live online sessions delving into different perspectives and processes.

  • Historical & contemporary practices With Lucy Mayes

  • Flowers of the Field With Natalie Stopka

  • Sustainability With Lucy Mayes

  • Making Laking Reagents With Lucy Mayes

  • Buckthorn Lakes With Natalie Stopka

  • Mushroom Lakes with Modifiers With Julie Beeler

  • Indigo and other non-laked colourants With Natalie Stopka with Lucy Mayes contributing

  • Madder Root Lakes With Natalie Stopka

  • Fungi Alkali Extractions With Julie Beeler

  • Lichen Lakes With Julie Beeler

  • Creating a Palette of Colours With Lucy Mayes

Registration opens in August, 2025.

Contact Natalie with queries about remote private instruction on intermediate and advanced topics.