In order to preserve your wedding flowers, they must all be dried completely before they're placed into resin and preserved. If fresh flowers were placed into resin, the water/moisture from the flowers would be trapped and would eventually rot the flowers turning them brown!
I use activated silica sand to dry flowers in their natural shape, without pressing them. This is the best way I've found to dry flowers which retains as much of their natural colour as possible. However, some colour changes still happen.
Some very common examples of change include:
- White flowers turn cream/yellow, and often have translucent spots and bruising from being touched by the florist and bride while fresh
- Red flowers turn very dark burgundy, some almost black
- Some pale pink flowers turn darker pink, some dry very faded
- Purple flowers may turn dark or faded
- Flowers may have bruised or brown areas which only show up once placed into the resin
In order to make your finished resin piece look as close to your fresh bouquet as possible, I colour correct any flowers that have drastically changed colour. I don't go into much detail about this process as I've spent years perfecting it and have tried out lots of different methods! There are lots of different ways to colour correct, including painting, spraying and dyeing, and different methods work better for different types of flowers and colours.
I always recommend sending pictures of your fresh bouquet so that we can match the colours as closely as possible!
At the end of the day, the flowers are still dried, so they won't look exactly the same as they did fresh, but colour correction helps to make the finished pieces look as close as they can to the original bouquet.
Not all preservation artists use colour correction, so it's important to decide whether this is something that you'd like! I generally add colour correction to all orders, but if you'd prefer the flowers to be natural I'd be happy for you to request this when you order.