Q: How do I care for dried palm leaves?
Step-by-step guide for painting palm leaves
By Alexandra Matkowsky August 14, 2022
Most palms are known by their large, green leaves and are most commonly found along the coast. However, due to their diversity, they can be found amongst deserts and rainforests.
Palm leaves belong to the Arecaceae or Palmae family. There are currently over 2,600 species of palms that grow in tropical and subtropical climates.
Palm leaves date back centuries and have been known to be used in ancient times for building materials and paper.
Palm leaves and fronds can also produce food for consumption such as coconuts, the popular Açaí berry and dates.
The beauty about palm leaves is that they are available all year round!
How to dry palm leaves:
The best way to dry palm leaves is out in the sun. Simply find a sunny spot and lay them on the ground to dry out for a few weeks.
- Source palm leaves from the beach if they have broken off a tree or get in touch with a wholesale flower market or florist for some fresh palm fronds.
- Find a sunny spot in your yard and lay out a large blanket, cloth or drop sheet.
- Place the palm leaves, palm fronds or branches out on the blanket. If you are drying multiple leaves, ensure they aren’t touching.
- Leave to dry out in the sun for a few weeks. The amount of time it will take to dry out the palms depends on the amount of sun it gets each day (we recommend drying them in late Spring or early Summer).
Decorating with Palm Fronds
What to do with dried palm leaves:
You can put Dried Palm Leaves on display in your home in a large vase or urn. They are also great for dried flower wall hangings, dried arrangements or simply in a vase on their own. We have seen them being used as fans lately which look super cute!
Palm Leaves have had multiple uses for centuries, with the leaves and fronds being used to weave hats, make roofs, as mulch for the garden, for woven baskets and more.
Adding dried palm leaves to your decor is a great way to bring that coastal feel inside your home, without the humidity!
Painting Pandanus.
One of the things I seem to be well known for is painting pandanus. It’s earned me the nickname as “Pandanus Man” (it’s better than some of the other names I’ve been called).
They are incredibly interesting plants for many reasons, but particularly for me, painting them is challenging and rewarding. There are lots of lovely twists and turns in the leaves and trunks, allowing for unexpected reflections of colours. Their structure gives a wonderful opportunity to create the illusion of dimension.
Added to that they live near the ocean, so you can paint a wonderful evocative beachscape in the background. Depth, depth and more depth.
We’ve had a lot of requests about painting pandanus, so thought we’d build this tutorial with a whole pile of useful tips and info to take some of the pain out of painting your pandanuseseseseses.
Slow down there Nelly, before we begin painting pandanus, we need to spend some time looking at pandanus leaves first, (and get to the trunks later). We’ll observe the range of colours in a pandanus leaf. You will discover yellows, greens and browns, some whites and blues in reflections (and more), and even some purple. On the dying tips you’ll find some unexpected bright flashes of colour.
The leaves tend to twist – this twisting recurs right through most leaves in slightly different places – unless it folds over, in which case it flattens across the top of the fold.
Start making marks by drawing out long lines to practise. Warm up your eyes and arm, and recreate the basic structure of the leaves. I’ve used thinned Dioxazine Purple and just blocked in the dark shapes and the lines. This is a great way to get a sense of how they work. See images below.
Let’s look at the trunk (branches).
We can shape the lines painted around the branch to create the illusion of the branch either coming toward you or going away from you. Practise creating this illusion for a while, only using tone at this point.
There’s a lot of scope to exaggerate this technique later, when it comes to using colour, by bouncing reflections off the sand on the underside of the branches, or reflecting the sky on the top of the branches.
We can also use perspective to create the illusion of the trunk receding into the distance or coming towards us. (Ie being larger at the top of the branch gives the illusion that that branch is coming towards us). This is a really effective tool to help “bring” the viewer into your painting.
Fundamentally a pandanus branch is a tube with lots of rings around it.
Look at the way a branch attaches to a tree – the “ring” section seems to split and the branch tends to grow out of it – it almost “squeezes” the branch out.
