Sue Reno Studio: Experiments in wet cyanotype

June 22, 2018

Experiments in wet cyanotype - part 20

Welcome to part 20 of my experiments in wet cyanotype, where I share the good, the bad, and the ugly (there's really not too much of that) as I work to dial in an excitingly unpredictable process. I'm still catching up with myself, so this batch was done the first week of June. I started with treated cotton sateen and garden leaves. Above is a painted fern and a hosta leaf, below is a single hosta.

Above are some perennial favorites, a wood poppy leaf and a smallish plume poppy leaf, and below is another painted fern. I sprayed a bit of very dilute textile paint on them, specifically a mix of Dynaflow #804 salmon and #807 cranberry, added a spritz of diluted soda ash around the edges, then sprayed with plain water. I covered them with glass then put them out into partly sunny conditions, temperatures in the 70's F, for about 24 hours.

The above used up all my available stash of treated fabric, but it was a nice day and I wanted to keep going, so I dug around and found some remnants of pre-treated fabric I bought over two years ago. It's a basic muslin, and I suspect it was an agreeable price point because it wasn't real heavily treated with the cyanotype chemicals. Nothing actually wrong with it, but I tried it out then set it aside. For straight cyanotype prints, it's recommended that you use the treated fabric within six months or so, but I had nothing to lose here so I gave it a go.

Above are two plume poppy leaves, below is another wood poppy.

Here are the exposed and un-rinsed prints. Lots of nice color separation and mottling on these first ones:

And here are the old chemical/muslin ones. So pastel and pretty!

Wood poppy leaves have a lot of yellow sap, so they often turn into a bit of an eco-print.

Here are the rinsed, finished prints. I'm very happy with them:

Ok, maybe not as happy with this fern. The moisture pooled up around the middle of the fern and washed out the print. It happens sometimes. I could easily delineate it with pen or stitch if I wanted to. And the background is still cool, so I could cut it up for patchwork.