For the time being, we will confine ourselves to depictions of lotus and papyrus in other uses than as the heraldic plants of Upper and Lower Egypt.

On the walls of temples and tombs, we see lotus flowers decorating offerings: wound around earthenware or faience water vessels, lying on top of piles of food - or as offerings in their own right.

Below is part of the vignette of Spell 81A from the Book of the Dead.

Both the shape of the flower, and the color of its petals, clearly show this to be the blue lotus.

It is delineated on the top by an arc. When the artist fills in the drawing with color, he must ignore the top elements, between the points of the petals, for they do not belong to the flower itself: they represent empty space. A modern artist would not have added the arc, thereby letting the space between the points of the petals stay a part of the background. The Egyptian draftsman however was committed to the use of simple, yet effective outlines. So he filled in the surplus space within the outline with white, to indicate that it was in fact empty space. This makes it a variant of the black that on statues is used for the space between the two legs, or between the arms and the torso (what Aldred calls “negative space”: see Aldred EA).

Above is a detail from the Anubis chapel in Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el Bahri. You see a rack with four water jars, each with a lotus flower on top. Again, the shape of these flowers is that of the blue lotus. We now recognize the white as representing the “empty space” within the conventional flower's outline. The missing blue and green pigments have either faded, or fallen off.

From the same chapel. Here we see papyrus and lotus flowers themselves as offerings in their own right. The lotus flowers in this example are of the white variety: note the wider, more open shape of the chalices. The hand to the right is that of the recipient: the god Amun-Re.

Both lotus and papyrus also figured frequently in the houses of the well-to-do. There, the columns were of wood, and next to papyrus columns (as well as several other types), we here encounter quite a few lotiform ones. Both lotus and papyrus flowers also decorated cosmetic appliances such as wooden spoons for unguents. Handles of hand-held mirrors often had the shape of a papyrus stem with flower.
The same motifs decorated pieces of furniture, too: see e.g. the wooden armchair of Hetepheres, mother of king Cheops (4^th dynasty). The sturdy, powerful design of bent papyrus flowers under the arm’s rests is an echo of the times (StS Art 88). Likewise, a particularly graceful alabaster lamp in the shape of three lotus flowers from Tutankhamun’s tomb, reflects the subtlety and refinement of New Kingdom high court taste. In the Third Intermediate Period, refined drinking goblets were made of faience, using the shape of a white lotus (wide, cup-like) or that of a blue lotus (narrow, beaker-like). (Some very fine specimen of both types in the Myers Collection, at Eton College.) 

Characteristic renderings of lotus and papyrus in the arts.
 

A capital in the shape of an open papyrus flower (Karnak, the central aisle of the great hypostyle, early 19th dynasty)   <==  Papyrus bundle columns, with capitals in the form of closed papyrus buds. (Luxor, court of Amenhotep III, 18th dynasty)

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