Nature printing is a printing process, developed in the 18th century, that uses the plants, animals, rocks and other natural subjects to produce an image. The subject undergoes several stages to give a direct impression onto materials such as lead, gum, and photographic plates, which are then used in the printing process.
While some sources state that Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...

 invented nature printing from leaf casts, using a copper plate press, in 1737 to thwart counterfeiters of paper money bills, other sources also report Franklin's friend, Philadelphia naturalist Joseph Breintnall, to have made contact nature prints from leaves about 1730. Together they sent nature prints which were printed directly from inked leaves to English naturalists.
Another person attributed with the invention of the process, Naturselbstdruck, is Alois Auer

Alois Auer

Alois Auer, born 1813 in Wels, Austria, died 11 June 1869; was a printer, inventor and botanical illustrator, most active during the 1840s and 1850s. He produced a number of works in German and other languages, including the first regarding the nature printing process. He was the director of the...

; the first publication, of instructions for the process, was by this Austrian printer in The Discovery of the Natural Printing Process: an Invention ... Vienna, 1853. This was written in four languages by the author. He shows the use of plants, a fossil fish, and lace impressesed by roller onto a lead plate, this is hand coloured and transferred to the final print.
Many others botanical and natural history illustrations had attempted to use techniques that were a 'shorthand', or for a type of accuracy, in the representation of subjects. Another printer, the Englishman Henry Bradbury

Henry Bradbury

Henry Bradbury is best known for his book The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland with author Thomas Moore and editor John Lindley published in 1855 and using the new technique of nature printing invented by Alois Auer and Andreas Worring in 1852 and improved by Bradbury...

, immediately used Auer's 'nature printing' process to publish work of his own. These included two major botanical works;

• The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland
  The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland
  The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland was a book published in 1855 that featured 51 plates of nature printing by Henry Bradbury.-Description:The text was a scientific description of all the varieties of Ferns found in the British Isles...
  
  , Moore, Thomas
  Thomas Moore (botanist)
  Thomas Moore was a gardener and botanist from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. An expert on ferns and fern allies from the British Isles, he served as Curator of the Society of Apothecaries Garden from 1848 to 1887...
  
  .(1857) and
• The Nature-printed British Seaweeds, (1859–60)

the rendition of these species was readily adapted to the process; the two dimensional print would reveal form and detail for the identification of species.

Sherman Denton, in As Nature Shows Them: Moths and Butterflies ... use the wings of the species he is describing, by pressing them into the page itself. For this work he collected over 50,000 insects for the 'Transfers of Species from Life'.

Auer method

Auer's method can only be used with objects with tolerably flat surfaces, such as dried and pressed plants, embroidery and lace, and a very few animal productions. The object is placed between a plate of steel and another of lead, both of which are smooth, and polished. They are then drawn through a pair of rollers under considerable pressure. When the plates are separated, it is found that a perfect impression of the object has been made in the leaden plate. This may be used directly as an engraved plate, but only if a very few impressions are wanted, for it is too soft to resist the action of printing presses for practical purposes. For larger numbers of images, a facsimile to be used as the printing plate is made in copper by the electrotype

Electrotyping

Electrotyping is a chemical method for forming metal parts that exactly reproduce a model. The method was invented by Moritz von Jacobi in Russia in 1838, and was immediately adopted for applications in printing and several other fields...

process.

Further reading

• Eric P. Newman, "Newly Discovered Franklin Invention: Nature Printing on Colonial and Continental Currency," The Numismatist (1964)