Free Vintage Mushroom Printables from an 18th-Century French Herbarium
Overview
Download three free printable mushroom collage sheets featuring detailed natural history illustrations from Herbier de la France, published in Paris between 1780 and 1793.
The collection includes 2.5 × 3.5-inch ATC-sized images, 1.5 × 2.5-inch journal-sized images, and four 3.5 × 5-inch postcard-sized images.
Use these vintage mushroom illustrations for junk journals, art journals, scrapbooking, ATCs, handmade cards, nature journals, collage art, and mixed-media projects.
The original illustrations come from an 18th-century French botanical and mycological publication by Pierre Bulliard and are in the public domain in the United States.
The high-resolution images can also be used for digital collage, digital scrapbooking, graphic design, and printable artwork.
The free collage sheets are available for personal and commercial creative projects, but the collage sheets themselves may not be redistributed or sold as standalone files.
Free Vintage Mushroom Printables for Junk Journals, ATCs & Collage Art
If you love vintage mushroom illustrations, botanical ephemera, natural history artwork, or woodland-inspired crafts, you are going to want these free mushroom printables.
I’ve created three printable collage sheets using authentic mushroom illustrations from Herbier de la France, an extraordinary French botanical work published from 1780–1793. The original plates document fungi with the kind of careful observation that makes antique natural history illustrations so appealing to modern crafters.
The free collection includes small images perfect for artist trading cards and junk journal layers, medium-sized images for journal pages and embellishments, and larger postcard-sized mushroom illustrations that can become focal points all on their own.
And yes, the printables are free to download.
Scroll down to find the printable sheets and download information, then keep reading for ideas for using these antique mushroom images in both physical and digital projects.
What Are Vintage Mushroom Printables?
Vintage mushroom printables are downloadable images based on historical artwork depicting fungi, mushrooms, and other natural-history subjects. They can be printed, cut apart, layered, and incorporated into creative projects such as junk journals, scrapbooks, art journals, handmade cards, collage, and mixed-media artwork.
These particular images are especially interesting because they aren't modern illustrations designed to imitate an antique look. They come from an actual historical source: Herbier de la France; ou, Collection Complette des Plantes Indigenes de ce Royaume; Avec Leurs Propriétés, et Leurs Usages en Medecine.
The book was published in Paris between 1780 and 1793 and is associated with French naturalist and mycologist Pierre Bulliard. The Biodiversity Heritage Library records the work as covering plants, fungi, medicinal plants, and poisonous plants, with a publication date of 1780–93.
For today's crafter, that makes these mushroom illustrations wonderfully useful pieces of authentic botanical ephemera.
More Free Vintage Botanical Printables to Explore
If mushrooms are your current creative obsession, and I certainly won't judge, there are plenty of other free botanical and natural-history printables at The Art Scavenger that pair beautifully with them.
For a larger collection, visit my Vintage Botanical Printables Hub, which brings together free botanical imagery for junk journals, art journals, scrapbooking, and collage.
You might also enjoy:
Free Vintage Butterfly Printables — Antique butterfly illustrations make lovely companions to mushrooms in nature journals and specimen-inspired collage pages.
Free Printable Insect Ephemera — Add vintage insects to your mushroom pages for a fuller natural-history collection.
German Mushroom Collage Sheets — If one mushroom collection isn't enough, these later German botanical illustrations give you another visual vocabulary of fungi.
Free French Postcard Ephemera — French postcard imagery can provide backgrounds, journaling spots, and architectural or travel-inspired elements for a French naturalist theme.
What's Included in the Free Mushroom Collage Sheets?
This giveaway includes three different sheets, each designed with a different type of project in mind.
1. Mushroom ATCs (2.5 × 3.5 Inches) - The first sheet features mushroom illustrations arranged at the classic artist trading card (ATC) size.
These are especially useful for:
Artist trading cards
Junk journal tuck-ins
Small journal cards
Specimen-style cards
Collage clusters
Pocket inserts
Miniature mixed-media artwork
Because the images are already arranged at a useful size, you can simply print, cut, and start creating.
2. Small Mushroom Images (1.5 × 2.5 Inches) - The second sheet contains smaller mushroom illustrations that are perfect when you need a little bit of botanical detail without taking over an entire page.
Try them as:
Junk journal embellishments
Layered collage pieces
Tags
Tiny specimen cards
Planner decorations
Scrapbook accents
Digital stickers
These smaller pieces are particularly handy for filling those awkward little spaces on a journal page where something seems to be missing.
3. Four Large Mushroom Postcards (3.5 × 5 Inches) - The third printable features four larger mushroom illustrations measuring approximately 3.5 × 5 inches.
These can be used as:
Journal cards
Postcard-style inserts
Focal images
Handmade cards
Framed miniature artwork
Scrapbook photo mats
Full-page collage elements
The larger format also gives you enough room to add handwritten notes, labels, botanical observations, quotes, or decorative borders.
The images can be used for both printable crafts and digital design projects, so don't feel limited to paper crafting.
Free 2.5 × 3.5 inch ATC-sized vintage mushroom printable featuring botanical illustrations from Herbier de la France, published in France between 1780 and 1793. Perfect for junk journals, ATCs, scrapbooking, collage, and nature-inspired crafts.
The History Behind These Mushroom Illustrations
Long before mushroom illustrations became popular in junk journals and cottagecore crafts, naturalists were using detailed drawings and engraved plates to document the plants and fungi around them.
Bulliard's work is particularly significant in the history of mycology. His publications combined scientific observation with beautifully rendered illustrations, and the plates in Herbier de la France show mushrooms from multiple perspectives, often including details of caps, stems, gills, and other identifying characteristics.
The illustrations have an appealing combination of scientific precision and decorative beauty. Earthy browns, muted greens, warm ochres, reddish caps, and carefully drawn textures make them easy to incorporate into both botanical and more whimsical creative projects.
The historical connection also makes these images a natural fit for natural history illustration, a visual tradition that remains popular among journal makers, scrapbookers, collectors, and mixed-media artists.
The source is particularly interesting from a printing-history perspective as well. Harvard's botanical collections note that Bulliard's Histoire des Champignons de la France was among the earliest works in which the engraving itself was colored before printing.
In other words, these aren't merely "old-looking" mushroom pictures. They are part of a fascinating chapter in the history of botanical and mycological illustration.
Creative Ways to Use Vintage Mushroom Illustrations
Mushrooms are surprisingly versatile collage subjects. Their unusual silhouettes and detailed textures make them easy to recognize, while their earthy colors work with everything from rustic kraft paper to dramatic dark-academia backgrounds.
Create a Naturalist's Field Journal
Turn a blank journal spread into an imaginary 18th-century naturalist's notebook.
Add:
Mushroom illustrations
Handwritten species names
Faux scientific notes
Torn book pages
Botanical labels
Hand-drawn borders
Brown or sepia ink
You don't have to be scientifically accurate. The fun is in creating the feeling of a collected field journal.
Make a Woodland Junk Journal
Pair the mushrooms with ferns, leaves, mossy colors, acorns, insects, and scraps of handmade paper.
They also work beautifully with cottagecore, woodland, goblincore, dark academia, and natural-history themes.
Use Them in Autumn & Halloween Crafts
Mushrooms naturally lend themselves to fall crafting. Their earthy colors look wonderful with autumn leaves, pumpkins, botanical specimens, old labels, and forest imagery.
For Halloween, you can take things in a darker direction by combining mushroom illustrations with black paper, antique typography, moths, beetles, moons, and mysterious handwritten notes.
That makes these printables useful well beyond one particular season.
Use These Printables for Digital Art & Design
Don't put these mushroom illustrations away just because you prefer working on a screen.
The high-resolution files can be incorporated into digital collage, graphic design, digital scrapbooking, printable wall art, and other digital projects. You can bring the images into tools such as Canva, Procreate, or Adobe Photoshop and build completely new compositions around them.
Digital project ideas
Digital junk journal pages
Mushroom-themed digital scrapbook layouts
Printable wall art
Nature-inspired social media graphics
Digital journal stickers
Website or blog graphics
Digital collage artwork
Pinterest graphics
Botanical mood boards
A few practical digital tips
Crop individual mushrooms - You don't have to use an entire collage sheet. Crop individual specimens from the sheet and save them as separate elements for future compositions.
Layer different sizes - Place a large mushroom behind smaller specimens, botanical text, paper textures, or handwritten elements to create depth.
Experiment with transparency - Lowering the opacity of an illustration can turn it into a subtle background layer while keeping the original artwork visible.
Remove or soften the background - In Photoshop, Procreate, or other image-editing software, you can isolate individual mushrooms or blend the aged paper background into your composition.
Because the original historical illustrations are public domain, they offer plenty of creative freedom. Just remember that the downloadable collage sheets themselves are original compilations created for The Art Scavenger and aren't intended for redistribution.
1.5” x 2.5” Vintage Mushroom Illustrations
Public Domain & Usage Information
The original artwork used in these printables comes from a historical publication that is out of copyright. The Biodiversity Heritage Library specifically lists Herbier de la France with a copyright status of NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT.
That means the underlying historical illustrations are in the public domain in the United States.
I've arranged those historical images into new collage sheets for modern crafters. The collage sheets are original compilations, however, so please don't upload, sell, or redistribute the sheets themselves.
You may use the printable artwork in your own creative work, including projects that you sell. For example, you can incorporate the images into:
Handmade junk journals
Art journals
Scrapbooks
Collage artwork
Handmade cards
Artist trading cards
Mixed-media pieces
Other finished craft projects
You may not sell or redistribute the collage sheets "as is," either digitally or in printed form.
If you want to share these printables with other crafters, the best approach is to share the link to this page rather than uploading the files somewhere else.
As always, if you plan to use historical artwork in a commercial project outside the United States, check the copyright rules that apply in your jurisdiction.
Why These Mushroom Printables Are Perfect for Fall
Mushroom imagery has a particularly strong seasonal appeal from late summer through autumn, when searches for woodland crafts, nature journaling, cottagecore, Halloween artwork, and fall paper projects begin to increase.
But you certainly don't have to wait for September to use them.
Mushrooms work year-round in:
Nature journals
Botanical studies
Cottagecore projects
Woodland-themed journals
Natural-history collections
Dark-academia artwork
Foraging-inspired pages
Children's nature projects
Handmade stationery
That's one of the advantages of botanical and natural-history imagery: it isn't tied to a single holiday. You can reinterpret the same mushroom illustration in completely different ways depending on the colors, papers, and other elements you place around it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these vintage mushroom illustrations public domain?
Yes. The original illustrations come from Herbier de la France, published in France between 1780 and 1793. The Biodiversity Heritage Library lists the work as NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT, meaning the historical source material is out of copyright.
Can I use these mushroom printables commercially?
Yes. You can incorporate the images into your own finished creative projects, including artwork and handmade items that you sell. You may not, however, sell or redistribute the downloadable collage sheets themselves as standalone files.
What paper should I use for printing?
For ordinary collage work, good-quality matte printer paper works well. For ATCs, journal cards, and postcards, try a heavier cardstock so the finished pieces have more body. Matte photo paper is another option if you want particularly rich color and sharp detail.
Can I use the mushroom images digitally?
Absolutely. The high-resolution files can be used in digital collage, digital scrapbooking, graphic design, printable artwork, and other digital projects. You can crop, layer, resize, and combine the illustrations with your own artwork in programs such as Canva, Procreate, and Photoshop.
3.5 × 5 inch postcard-sized vintage mushroom illustrations
Final Thoughts
There is something especially satisfying about taking an illustration that was originally created for an 18th-century natural history book and giving it a completely new life on a modern craft table.
These mushroom plates were created centuries ago to document the natural world. Today, they can become ATCs, journal cards, scrapbook embellishments, digital collages, handmade cards, or tiny pieces of imagined natural-history journals.
Whether you're building a woodland junk journal, putting together a fall scrapbook, experimenting with botanical collage, or simply collecting beautiful mushroom ephemera, I hope you have fun with them.
Download the three free mushroom collage sheets and start cutting, layering, and creating!
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Terms of use:
Free to use for personal or commercial projects. You may print the collage sheets as many times as you wish for your personal crafts or in your projects to sell, including: art journals, scrapbooks, junk journals, collage art, etc. You may not redistribute or sell the collage sheets “as is" in either print or digital form.
If you wish to share the files on your own website, please do not make the files available for download directly from your site. Instead, include an image with a link back to this site.
To the best of my knowledge, these are all royalty free images that are in the Public Domain in the US. However, you should always do your own research if you plan to use them commercially.
