Tag: Artquestlondon

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.