The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s new art exhibit invites guests to enjoy the art of four contemporary printmakers using traditional techniques to capture the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

The Living Print opens Oct. 25, featuring the intricate botanical portraits of Latifat Apatira; woodblock prints of Sara Woodburn; and fish prints by Dwight Hwang and Mineo Ryuka Yamamoto.

Visitors to the exhibit can try their own hand at botanical rubbing methods in the gallery workshop, and get a closer look at the artists’ methods in process videos.

Raised in San Mateo County, California, Apatira explored the natural world from oak woodlands to redwood forests from an early age, forming a personal connection with plants and their diversity.

“My art involves hand-pressing inked fresh plants onto paper to create unique botanical portraits,” she said. “It allows for the examination of botanical complexity as the inked plants share their oft overlooked fingerprinted secrets of beauty, diversity, detail, texture, and form.”

Apatira’s delicate work is a form of “botanical advocacy,” that she hopes “inspires others to look at the plants around them a little more deeply and wonder.”

Santa Barbara artist Woodburn studied textile, graphic and costume design in Japan; and the Japanese woodblock printing method of mokuhanga at the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado.

“The print is made from a carved wood block using watercolor, handmade paper, and brushes and pressure by hand. The process is meditative, flexible, and non-toxic,” she said.

Woodburn’s work includes unique perspectives on familiar local landscapes like Elings Park and San Marcos Foothills Preserve.

“These works convey my experience of nature, in particular favorite landscapes that I’ve visited and sketched,” she said. “Perhaps you will find a connection in these images and be inspired to create from nature.”

Hwang is a Southern California-based artist known for his approach to Japanese gyotaku, a medium “much like Japanese woodblock printing, but it is the fish itself that is the slate,” he said.

“Gyotaku is a centuries old Japanese folk art where one would brush calligraphy ink onto a fish, rub paper onto it to create a print,” he said.

The results capture fleeting moments of life, and convey a philosophy of “perfect imperfection” by taking a naturally imperfect subject and emphasizing the imperfections to the point of beauty.

Among other venues, Gyotaku’s work has been featured at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

Presiding over the dozens of works by Apatira, Hwang and Woodburn, is Yamamoto’s print of a 17-foot-long squid.

A renowned nature and gyotaku artist, Yamamoto has worked with printmakers from Japan, Europe, Canada, China, and the United States since 1973 and has taught his techniques to thousands worldwide. His work has been featured at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.