The solstices, summer and winter, are important milestones in my year, and I like to engage in art-making on them if at all possible. This year there was a bit of sunshine on the winter solstice, so while conditions for printmaking were far from ideal, I wanted to have a bit of fun and try making a wet cyanotype print. I used a large cotton sateen panel and coated it with my last leftover dribs of cyanotype chemicals. I didn't wait for the chemicals to dry, which is always an interesting experiment. I used leaves I had pressed and dried in the fall, including
catalpa,
green ash, red oak, sassafrass, white oak, Joe Pye weed, and an unspecified
maple. I covered the works with plastic and took it outside to expose.
Conditions were definitely not ideal! But I moved it around a few times to catch the sunniest spots available.
At sunset I decided it could use more exposure time, so I left it out overnight. It froze up and created lots of lovely crystal patterns. Here you can see a sassafrass leaf among the frozen patterning.
I brought it in at the close of the second day, and it was still quite wet. I removed the leaves and left the panel to dry in the dark overnight.
Here is the rinsed, finished panel. I'm so happy with how beautifully it turned out. Solstice art is significant art. It's up on the design wall right now while I think about how best to proceed with it.
I've been working with cyanotype since 2002, and with the wet cyanotype process since the summer of 2017. All the wet cyan posts, of which this is number 47, where I document my experiments in detail, are available in reverse chronological order by clicking the "Wet Cyanotype" tab in the header bar, or by going here.
And a reminder that you can also follow along on your social media of choice:
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3 comments:
Have you ever thought of offering some of your prints to a fabric manufacturer to have made available to quilters to play with? I have been having fun quilting the Dream Big panels by Jeanne Sumrall-Ajero (printed by Hoffman). Having such wonderful artwork available to play with long-arm quilting machines is great fun. There seems to be a large market for people to use these panels in practicing their quilting skills, resulting in a wonderful outcome.
You inspired me to try the wet cyanotype printing. I have tried today and got quite good results. I am curious to use soda water as you mentioned in the past, can you please tell me what concentration is the soda in the water?
Thank you so much for your blog with the information about the process with all the examples you upload.
Geisha, Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you’re having fun with the process! For the soda water, I just eyeball it, maybe a heaping teaspoon in a pint of water. It doesn’t take a lot to influence the chemical reaction. You can also experiment with sprinkling very small amounts of the dry washing soda powder on the print before exposure.
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