Am I Blue?
“… Ain’t these tears in my eyes telling you?”
Enough of Batman singing, I’m mostly talking again about cyanotypes.
Work is progressing and hopefully by the time this blog is posted the first iteration of my UV light bed will be completed, I’m just needing to get a board cut to size and route the edges to fit the inside of the shadow box ready to start testing. That being said I’ve started to print out the negatives using the specifics our lecturer set (I’m not explaining them as I barely know)
Three of six images, because I forgot to get a photo of all them.
So I’ve talked about it a little in a previous blog post but to quickly recap cyanotype is a process of exposing an emulsion to UV light to chemically react to produce a deep blue image; it’s directly connected to analog film process that your parents might know about.
There is a bit more wibbly wobbly going on here though as there are many many MANY factors to exposure, for example how you coat your paper, how much emulsion do you use, etc, all of which are variable to get a decent exposure. I got to play a little with the procedure last semester and have been champing at the bit to do more.
This is underexposed but I didn’t have a chance to do another one.
As you can see the brush stroking makes a different, the hard edge on the left hand side do the image box makes a difference, and simple things like exposure time make a difference.
Because I’m a cheap ass maker I’m bodging my way through this as best on my non-existant budget so I’m using things like a Cat Litter tray to wash my prints after exposure (this gets rid of left over chemicals and prevents accidental UV exposure affecting the print)., and buying things online and waiting for them to come in; doesn’t help when your national big hardware chain doesn’t stock things that seem to be easy to buy in every single other country in the world.
As for a quick update, still working on my book and I think I’ve got it locked down enough where it’s just tweaking. The Skulls images are done and submitted for the assessment, the closing date itself is I think next week so I’ll see where we go from there. This isn’t including the other assessments boiling along as we speak, so I’m still plenty busy with things that don’t actually involve shoving a camera up to my face and pushing a button.
S
