Leafy Creations

My team have put up a display with a theme on leaves at HortPark’s Lifestyle Corner from September to October 2009. In it, we showcased a variety of popular and interesting foliage houseplants that highrise dwellers can grow in their homes, which included various Ficus and Peperomia species and their cultivars.

There are also a couple of other smaller exhibits that can be found in this ongoing display in the Lifestyle Corner. One of which is how one can use leaves to make decorative items to adorn one’s home. If you happen to have a curtain or a mesh-like surface at home, you can put up a variety of leaves of varying sizes, shapes, colours and textures in a random fashion to add some interest to it. You can modify this concept by using flowers in place of leaves.

Some of the plant materials you may want to use do require a water source and you can provide this via fixing a small glass test tube filled with some water. Such test tubes are those used by florists and are available for sale in the floristry corner in the nurseries located at Joan Road, Singapore. You can fix the test tubes onto your structure by using fine copper wires. To add some novelty, you can even add some food colouring to the water but beware if you are using white flowers as these will change colour as they uptake the food colouring!

There is another idea that you can adopt. As most Singaporeans are aware, dried lotus and bamboo leaves that are sold in our markets are meant for wrapping food in Chinese cuisine but these can be used as alternative materials for creating art.

In an idea that I want to share here, I stuck such leaves on a rectangular piece of styrofoam board to create a leaf painting of sorts. Styrofoam is a very affordable material as well as very light and makes the hanging of your leaf painting much easier. It may be viewed as a little environmentally unfriendly, one can opt to use recycled corrugated board (used to make cardboard boxes) instead. To stick the leaves onto the board, it is recommended that you use hot silicon glue from a glue gun.

Another tip to take note of when making your own leaf painting is to showcase leaf surfaces that have an interesting texture. In the case of a lotus leaf, the underside is a lot more visually appealling as it has numerous leaf veins and bears the cut end of the leaf petiole where one can see the circular arrangement of air channels in the petiole. When making a painting using lotus leaves, I created some contrast by having some parts covered with the leaves that are showing the upperside while on other parts, the undersides.