The chemicals used in cyanotype are very safe! Safer than traditional photo development, even B&W. I never wear gloves, even.
You can get started with minimal knowledge–all you really need to read is the directions on the back of the bottle. To lean the intricacies obviously takes a lot longer, mostly just experience and practice. Beyond the basics, when I have a question I’ll Google. Picked up some cool tidbits on Reddit. But mostly I just experiment!
It was actually all adults except for Miriam, but that wasn’t her print–her dad made that one. 😅 Hers is in the row below on the right.
I love this, reminds me of a bonfire. What materials did you use/what was your process if you didn’t mind sharing?
Thank you :)
No quarantine. Just like flying with a pet from one US state to another. The rescue will pay for extra costs if there are any, but I didn’t have any with my flight.
A volunteer from the receiving rescue met me at the airport when I landed and picked him up before our luggage even came out on the carousel.
Hell yeah! It’s an alternative photography process. You mix up a chemical emulsion and paint it on some watercolor paper (or fabric or wood or anything porous). Then you can arrange a composition on the paper with stuff like plants (what we focus on for this class) but other stuff like have or loose knit fabrics, objects with neat shapes, whatever. You can also take photos or do digital design and print out negatives on transparencies.
Once you’re ready to go, you expose them in the sun! There’s a lot of different factors in how long you expose them for–time of day, time of year, cloud cover, the thickness of your design materials, the pH of your paper or fabric, and a bunch of other stuff I know I haven’t learned about yet. In my class we watch everyone’s prints and I explain the different phases you can see them go through. I talk about what changes I’m looking for and factors I’m considering. I’ll tell each person when I think theirs is done and what has led me to that decision. It gets easier with practice, but I always tell people it’s a great art form for “recovering perfectionists” because I’m always learning something new.
Once they’re exposed, you just rinse in a plain water bath and you get that awesome blue. This was about 20 minutes after rinsing, but they continue to get deeper in color over the next day or so as the pigments oxidize.