My usual spring gardening activities were delayed this year, due to unseasonable cold and wet weather. So May turned into a very busy and intensive foray into pruning and planting. I moved here in the summer of 2019, and most of the first year was spent rejuvenating existing plantings and fighting a massive thistle invasion; after that I was able to begin to shape things to my liking. This spring it seems like the plan is finally coming together.
Anyway, part of the pruning involved a leatherleaf viburnum, which has taken off with great enthusiasm and needed some guidance and shaping. The leaves are very, well, leathery, but also have a lot of fine bristles on them. I thought they would be ideal for some long exposure wet cyanotype prints.
I set up a bunch of them on mineral paper, my current/ongoing obsession, and also did two larger ones on cotton sateen. I added just a small amount of Solarfast green to the chemical mix. This first batch of photos is before exposure.
Here they are after exposure and before rinsing.
The little bristles on the surface of the leaves adhered fairly firmly to the surface of the mineral paper in a lot of spots.
Rather than try to pick them off and risk damaging the paper, I decided to wait and gently soak the leaf fragments off in the rinse.
On the sateen prints this was less of a problem.
Here are the finished prints. They were well worth the little bit of extra trouble!
There's tons and tons of variation to look and marvel at.
So unpredictable and so cool.
The prints on the sateen are a little less wild but no less lovely.
This last image is number 974 that I've posted since I started documenting my wet cyanotype experiments, so I'm quickly approaching 1,000 with no sign of slowing down. I hope some of you have been enjoying coming along for this ride as much as I've enjoyed sharing it.
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