Sue Reno Studio: Experiments in wet cyanotype

July 26, 2025

Experiments in wet cyanotype - part 95

Welcome to more adventures in wet cyanotype printing, starting with the leaves of that crowd favorite, tall blue lettuce, Lactuca biennis. This is a native plant that tends to grow along the edges of woodlands and disturbed ground. It is a biennial, meaning it forms a rosette of leaves in its first year from seed while it builds up root strength, then in its second year it sends up an impressively tall flower stalk.

All three of these prints are on cotton sateen, with cyanotype chemicals and just a dash of Solarfast. The first batch of pictures shows them just after I've prepped them for exposure. Below is a leaf of the lettuce and a sprig of the decidedly non-native Japanese knotweed, Fallopia japonica.

And here is a solo sprig of the knotweed. It's a horrible invasive, but it does make for a nice print.

Here are the prints after exposure but before rinse out. Looking good so far!

Here are the finished prints. Sometimes I like a good solid edge to the subject matter, and sometimes I appreciate the halos that develop. It's all up to chance, or rather to the particular combination of the moisture level in the plants, the temperature and humidity, the angle of the sun, and the length of the exposure. I can control some of that but it's still always a surprise, and that's what keeps me coming back for more.