Category: Cyanotype

Artquest 30/30 Day 26 ‘Share your hack for being an artist’

The hints get more and more obscure but I think I can see where they are going. After much discussion with Mr Google (we are becoming quite good friends), I came to the conclusion it was about sharing any tips you have, what keeps you going, what is the secret of success. I’m not sure I’m the one to share any tips, especially about success, after all I signed up for this challenge as a result of being ‘stuck’. If I did have one tip though it would be take inspiration form wherever you can get it. There are many artists whose work I admire but they don’t necessarily inspire me to go out and make the sort of work they make; wildlife photographers for example. Our local camera club has a number of members who make absolutely beautiful wildlife photographs but I have no desire to follow suit. And whilst most of my photography is landscape based, I don’t want to get up before dawn to go and make the same photographs that many landscape photographers make. I want to do something different.

A few years ago we were on holiday in Avignon and I spotted that the local art gallery had the work of some famous painters so off I went to take a look. I have never been so disappointed. It was small, darkly lit and the artwork really did nothing for me. Chatting to the receptionist at the hotel, she suggested I also visit the ‘Collection Lambert’ which is the museum of modern art. I went along without expecting too much as modern art ‘wasn’t really my thing’, but what a revelation! Yes, there were some exhibits that could have been made by a 5 year old and lots consisting or just words that I couldn’t really get my head round but this is where I was introduced to Land artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, French artist Claire Tabouret’s The Lookouts and Detanico and Lain’s Ulysses, which blew me away. The exhibitions were very varied in terms of style and content and so refreshing, I have never since said that modern art isn’t my thing and whenever in Edinburgh, head for Mod 1 and Mod2 in preference to the National Gallery. I’m not suggesting that we should all go out and study modern art, just that we keep an open mind and be prepared to immerse ourselves in something different as invariably something will rub off and fire up the imagination.

This work is a composite of work inspired by some of the artists who inspire me. They mostly work in ICM, multiple exposures, alternative processes such as cyanotypes and Photoshop techniques such as stretching pixels.

Artquest 30/30 Day 24 ‘Make your art from your biggest stress’

Where do I start? I stress about every thing, mainly because I’m trying to juggle too many things at once, I hate saying no and I then expect everything to be perfect. Taking on two arty projects at the same time without giving something else up is a good example of that! Somehow I need to find a path through all the chaos and working on composite images a c0uple of days ago gave me the idea for this. The original photograph was taken at Bixlade, in the Forest of Dean and this is layered together with a cyanotype of oak leaves and blended in Photoshop. Maybe there is a path through the chaos!

Artquest 30/30 Day 22 ‘Give in to your responsibilities’

So I could have just abandoned this challenge and gone and done the ironing but I’m over 2/3rds of the way there so not stopping now! When I searched the definition for this hint, I came up with things like ‘commit to something you have undertaken to do’ and it got me thinking about a project I tentatively started a few years ago, based around the iron industry in the Forest of Dean. I had been inspired by a photographer called Toril Brancher who was appointed Artist in Residence at LLwyn Celyn when the property was being restored in 2018. Rather than documenting the restoration, she wanted to find a link between the many generations of people who had lived in the property over several hundred years and focused on the plant life around the property for her project which she called ‘Could the grass remember?’ Whilst there is lots of information, including photographs of the coal industry in the Forest of Dean, there is very little about iron, even though it had been a main source of industry for many more years, since Roman times up until the early 19th Century. What hasn’t changed though is the plant life and this is where my work had started. My thinking was that I would use cyanotype to record the plant material and where possible, photograph where mines had been and somehow bring the 2 together. Early experiments seemed to work ok but by this time, I was coming to the end of year 2 of my photography studies, covid landed and that’s when I came to a halt.

My task for today’s work was to make another composite using some of the images I had made back then and maybe, just maybe, I will pick this up again and see where it goes. So today’s image is a wet cyanotype made from ferns collected at the Scowels near Bream, at a place known as the Devil’s Chapel and combine it with a photograph taken at the same place at the same time and modified in Photoshop.

I like the image, particularly the rust or iron effect produced with some of the filters in Photoshop but the photograph taken on the day doesn’t come through clearly enough, so whilst this meets the brief, it is back to the drawing board to see it this project still has any potential.

Artquest 30/30 Day 12 ‘Force a change in your practice’

 Today’s hint, which I can ignore, is ‘Force a change in your practice’. I can only think that the @artquestlondon robots are reading my Instagram posts and noted my wittering on about test strips yesterday! It probably is time for a change, but how do I force it or has it already been forced upon me? However, having spent days working on test strips, changing the curves on negatives and doing more test strips, I finally have something I’m almost happy with so the change will take place tomorrow.

Thus was made from the last sheet of Fabriano 50% cotton that I sensitised for the test strips I made yesterday as I’m very aware that the slightest change in any of the variables will result in a change in the final print. It was exposed at 4 1/2 minutes using my Everbeam 100 watt UV lamp. The Church spire is still not quite right but I was relatively happy with it until I spotted a major problem.

I hadn’t cut the watermark off the bottom of the paper before exposing the print. How frustrating!!! Sometimes it really is time for a change, but for now, this is my day 12 submission.

Artquest 30/30 Day 11 – ‘Make your last ever work’

Playing catch up again. I start off with great intentions but time seems to slip away. I’m still in the challenge and have been posting to Instagram daily as soon as I have uploaded my image. Maybe that is when I should add my post here but I always have more to say here and so it goes on.

I am finding these hints more challenging as time goes on. How do you interpret ‘last ever work’. If I took that literally I wouldn’t make any more work at all and I don’t think that is the intention. One person appeared just to scrawl ‘last ever work’ on a board and I don’t think that’s the intention either. I chose a slightly more challenging route which was to decide that this would be my last ever attempt to get some cyanotype test strips right for the work I had planned for the next day and I would go with whatever the outcome was.

Initially I had been using a ‘Bockingford 90lb’ paper. It is quite lightweight and warped when sensitised. Also, it didn’t seem as absorbent as some of the other papers I have used. I’m not sure what I bought it for, maybe book making but it doesn’t really work for cyanotype so, back to one of my favourites, Fabriano 50% cotton that I got from the sale shelf in Jacksons Art. Whilst I’ve made plenty of cyanotype prints, very few have been made using digital negatives and this is a whole new ball game as I’m finding out. I hadn’t really appreciates why you were advised to use a fairly low contrast photo until I found all of the highlights blown whilst the dark areas were over exposed. A custom curve for cyanotype in Photoshop is also advised and luckily there is one in Christina Z Anderson’s book on the subject, albeit for an Epson printer but a good starting point nonetheless. So this is where I am so far. Three more test strips, all sensitised with the same solution at the same time.

The first test was exposed at 5, 6 and 7 minutes. However, the church building is built from lighter stone than the school, so I did the same again with a larger section of the negative.

This suggested 5 minutes so the final test was done at 4, 5 and 6 minutes

I know this was supposed to be a challenge but I wasn’t prepared for it to drive me bonkers! 

A bit of catching up to do.

I have kept up with my art projects over the last week, now 10 days in for the Artquest 30/30 challenge and 5 weeks in for Bobbin Along. Artquest 30/30 first.

Each day. Artquest give a hint which can be used as inspiration or ignored and to be honest, I don’t always find the hints work that well for photography, at least not what I want to do. However, whether it is maybe my brain is becoming attuned or just more open minded, for the last couple of days. I have found something I thought worked.

For day 7 of the 30/30 challenge, the hint was a day in your life. for this I chose a photo I took a couple of years ago in Wester Ross, the one I had used for cyanotype test strips a couple of days previously. I wasn’t terribly happy with the resulting cyanotypes. Two were over exposed and the other ok ish. I bleached the over overexposed images and toned 1 of them, then wove them together with the original photograph and entitles the resulting image ‘4 Seasons in a Day’ which you frequently get in Wester Ross.

I’m not sure that weaving the cyanotypes with the original image was entirely successful and can only think this is at least in part due to shrinkage when cyanotypes are continually washed.

Day 8 hint was easier and again I delved into my archive of photographs. The hint was ‘Triangle, cross, circle, square’ and for this I chose a photo that I had taken a few years ago for a camera club competition.

I cut the photo into a square with the circular missor in the centre, then cut from corner to corner making 4 triangles and places some dark card underneath to make a cross. I wish they were all that simple!

Artquestlondon 30/30 Day 6

I thought after yesterday’s test strips I was just about there as it seemed to me that 9 minutes was about right on the paper I had tested. Not so however as when I printed the actual image at 9 minutes it was very over exposed., I did another at 6 minutes with the same result. As I said in my last post, this lamp is more powerful than my old one, I hadn’t realised just how much.

I had two sheets of precoated cyanotypes left from a pack I had purchased last year to make cyanotypes with the year 6 children in our local school and thought I would try exposing those at 3 minutes to see what happened.

I’m not quite sure what had happened with the digital negative of the scabious flower, maybe it wasn’t inverted, but I got a better result then I’d had at 6 minutes so it did the job.

I then used the second sheet of paper to print the old crofthouse I had intended to make in the first place.

This was cheap paper which was already partly exposed at one end so while this print is not the quality I would be happy with, it does give me a starting point for tomorrow’s experiments which I will make on decent watercolour paper.

All is not entirely lost with the over exposed prints either though. I have bleached both and toned one with green tea. They are currently drying and tomorrow I intend to weave them along with the one above and see what results. More a question of reuse, recycle and reclaim again rather than following today’s hint with was ‘Try cheating today’.

Artquest 30/30 Day 5 – Boring but necessary

Some months ago, about 18 to be precise, I bought a new Ultraviolet lamp for my cyanotypes and gum bichromate prints and I have done nothing with it since. The main reason being that for printing, it needs to be hung with the light facing downwards onto the material to be printed and I needed to get a bracket of some sort to hang it onto. It recently dawned on me that my tripod has a boom arm allowing you to photograph with the camera facing downwards, and this is perfect for what I need.

The lamp is quite heavy but I have been able to balance it by hanging a sports weight from the tripod end.

This lamp is more powerful than my old lamp and the distance from the material being printed is different too and varies according to how the tripod is adjusted so I needed to make some test strips before I could move on to the real thing. I used 2 different papers as a starting point and exposed the first one 3 minutes apart, the second 5 minutes apart and based on those results, the final one with the S shaped hooks, for 8 minutes, which looked about right.

All papers are different and require different exposure times, so tomorrow’s job is to do some more test prints using digital negatives, fine tuned with a customised curve for cyanotypes produces in photoshop and hopefully after that, I will be ready to make a proper print.

Artquest 30/30 Day 4: A cold morning on Rannoch Moor

So today I am back in my box of cyanotypes but this time, made from digital photographs and the plan is to bleach and tone, then weave with the original image that the cyanotype print was made from.

The bleaching and toning process is a little more scientific this time, though to be honest the outcome is still not predictable. My research tells me that one of the best solutions for bleaching is sodium carbonate or washing soda which is readily available in supermarkets, not in the Forest of Dean it seams! However a little hardware store came up trumps. 1 teaspoonful of the soda crystals to 1 litre of water and watch it like a hawk my research also told me. It took no more than 15 minutes to bleach the print. Again my toning agent was green tea. 10 teabags left to brew in 250 ml boiling water for 10 minutes than another 1 1/2 litres cold water added. It can take anything from 2 to 8 hours to get the desired effect, mine took nearly 3 hours to achieve what I wanted.

Weaving with the original image was the second stage of the process and I decided to go with the l cyanotype that I had dyed rather than uploading and reprinting it. This meant though, that I was weaving 2 papers of different weight and textures. As the cyanotype was made on heavier water colour paper, I used that as the base, slicing down from the border at the top, right to the bottom, whilst the original photograph, printed on lighter weight matt photo paper, was sliced into strips horizontally. Although both images had started off exactly the same size, I was worried that the repeated wetting of the cyanotype may have caused it to shrink and there are one or two areas of the final print that aren’t quite aligned, although it could just be that I needed to take more care! It was a god starting point though and as a first attempt, I was reasonably happy..

For the future, I think it would be better to scan in the toned cyanotype and print the 2 images on the same paper, making it easier to align and softer to weave.

Artquest 30/30 Day 3 -Reuse, recycle, reclaim

Artquest 30/30 day 3 and the hint is ‘reuse. recycle’ reclaim’ which was very apt for my focus for this challenge which is, as far as possible to utilise existing material that has lain untouched for months. Having started the challenge bleaching and toning, then weaving old cyanotype prints, today’s plan was to weave 2 failed cyanotypes printed onto fabric, one under and the other over exposed. When making cyanotypes on fabric, it needs to be stretched tight to get an even print and one had been made on a 9″ embroidery hoop resulting in the print being circular, so I used this again as it kept the fabric taught as I wove the 2 together. In both cases, the prints had been made using ferns, so, like those used on day 2, they were similar but different. I think the subject matter is more obvious there than it was in yesterday’s piece. To add a little texture I went back to my textile scrap box and ‘reclaimed’ a few contrasting strips. Does this add interest or just confusion? Outside of my comfort zone certainly but I think I like it.

For day 4, I will be going back to bleaching and toning.