Cyanotype Printmaking with the RPC

hello today you join me at the regional print center and we're gonna make some cyanotype [Music] [Applause] [Music] prints [Music] so we'll start by showing you some examples of um of the cyanotype print and these are some that i prepared earlier in a good tradition [Music] these two which are done with feathers and string and paper clips you'll find out as we go along the process and i'll explain it then but these are just examples of the print this one's done with with wire just placed over the top of the paper and this is done with um from a drawing an ink drawing black ink drawing on tracing paper so there are variations that you can do and achieve different ways of making the prints using various methods to stop the light getting to the paper which we'll go through very shortly so what the process involves is coating a piece of paper with a solution of light sensitive chemicals i'll show you one that's coated already it can it looks like that now that's light sensitive um obviously we're in led lighting at the moment and um it's fine for a short period of time so it's not like the traditional photographic paper where as soon as it touches any light it's had it you can keep it in daylight for a short period of time while you work with it so to make the solution we you ten you can buy a little kit just like this it has instructions on the back how to make the solution it's two separate chemicals we have one potassium throat ferric cyanide which is part a part b is ferric ammonium citrate so they come in little bottles in powder form you add water to them let it stand for about 24 hours and then when you come to coke paper you mix equal parts of the solutions of the two solutions together and then the the the mixed solution becomes light sensitive once though you put water in these containers they will keep i understand for quite some time once they are mixed together the solution will probably last for a couple of hours i think it said on the it looks really two to four hours it says on the packet so um you just mix up the solution the amount of solution that you need i've been coating paper that size with 15 ml of each so 30 ml of solution and i would probably get 20 to 30 coat papers coated with it easily with that so it goes quite a long way the paper that we're using for the cyanotypes is just a good quality etching paper or a watercolor paper needs to be about 250 300 grams um that will take a good um amount of moisture um and we are going to rinse the the sheets after we've exposed them to wash them wash the solution off so they do need to be have a substantial quality other things that we will need will be a container to mix the solution in a brush to apply the solution we need some sort of measuring container where we can accurately measure the amounts of liquid solution that we are going to mix together once we get all that together um we're ready to go which would go on to the next stage and we'll show you the coating process um and we'll take it from there right i'm gonna mix up the the two solutions together um and coat some paper and take you through that process um i've turned the the overhead lights off within the print center to dim the light down and this light will be sufficient um to save the the paper it won't affect the paper so i'm going to take my measuring jug and part a i'm going to use 15 mil of that measured into here [Music] a good shake before you use it like so and 50 ml of part b solution which is going to give me 30 ml of course so it taps back on the the bottles mix it up and pour it into our container as you can see there's not a lot in there i'm just being frugal with the solution that we've got so i'll take some paper this particular paper i'm using is is called unica not an expensive paper we use it quite a lot within within the center for courses and it's ideal for this uh testing so um i'm just brushing the solution onto the paper giving it a good coating but you don't want to have too much on the paper it's a bit like if you've applied a wash with watercolors you find um that it does sort of flood in certain areas and you need to be aware of that because that can build up and i'll show you in a second um you could coat it over to right over to the edge of the paper but quite often it's nice to see the the brush marks in it but you will see now this one i did just then that the paper curls a bit and there is a flood here of the solution which can be not the best when you come to expose it it could be too much so i tend to with the brush just um lift it off so you can go ahead and coat as many sheets as you want but that solution once it's mixed it's mixed you you can't save it um you've got to use it really or bin it so again this sheet has curdled a bit um and i'm just gonna take that bit of flooded area off the sheet and that's it [Applause] so i'll put those to dry along with the rest that i'm doing and we'll move on from that in a few minutes so i have a couple of dry sheets here now and i'm just going to place some objects that i've got lying around onto the onto the sheet which will act as a a positive to stop out the lines penetrating through so some things are more transparent than others um it's better if you've got something that's quite flat really that will be flattened down so you can see that these stand off the um the paper at the moment but um i'm gonna put a piece of perspex over it so that will take it down but i've also got some little shards of paper which i'm gonna just sprinkle around as well just to see [Music] how these how this works [Music] this is just for demonstration purposes of course i expect um all the creatives inspiring people that are watching this video will have their own ideas of what they can [Music] use as a positive to block out the light okay let's take a piece of string as well and we'll just drop it on i've got some wire here i'm just going to drop some pieces of wire over the top as well [Music] so you can see it with this i'm using objects but you don't always need to use objects you could use like i showed you before a an ink drawing on tracing paper or on acetate and that will do just as good it's a bit like pickup sticks this anybody remember that game [Music] right so i've got that as i'll now take my sheet of perspex and i'm just gonna drop that over the top and hold it in position make sure the perspex or plastic sheeting i should say that perspex is is clean you don't want mucky areas on it because if you've used it for monoprinting or something like that just give it a good clean so i'm going to clip this down now and then i'm going to put it outside for 30 minutes we've got a real good day outside it's cold there's snow on the ground but it's one of those winter days when the the sun is really bright and strong so it's a good day to do this process [Music] so i put these outside now in the sun it's two o'clock in the afternoon on the january afternoon and the sun is really low so you can probably see where the shadows are falling on these um papers i'm going to expose them for 30 minutes and see how they come out okay i brought these in from outside they've been out there for 30 minutes um the sun has gone down so it's not really had its full 30 minutes and one of the points with this is that you can probably see a hope with these cameras that the the um the objects aren't sitting totally flat against the paper but we'll develop these images and see see what we've got if not i'll make another one and we'll try and again on another sunny day which will probably be about six months away okay so plastic sheet off just take everything off oh you all you can see there that there's the feathers have come out and then on this one there's some marks there so we'll we'll see i think there'll be some something to look at so what i'll do now i've got a tray of water here if you haven't got a tray of water you could use a sink depending on the size of paper you've got obviously so i'm just going to put this in water it's just ordinary water and you can see there's an instant change in the image it's quite blurry and i think a lot of that is to do with the movement of the sun of course 30 minutes is quite some time but um i read that you should leave these in for about 10 minutes let them wash out and keep moving the water around just as you would do if you have ever developed um an analog photo the longer it's exposed to light the darker the blue becomes but you do run the risk of bleeding out the image if it's a very fine detail you're quite lucky with this because here you can see that there's quite a fine line with that it's worked quite nice so i've got that in there i'm going to pop the other one over the top i would normally do them one after the other but i'm just saving time really um i'm probably going to leave that there i think really because i'm quite happy with that image as it is and i'll put that over to dry so this is the one with the feathers now let's see what we've got on this one again you can see there's an instant change in the image you can see where the feather is sat closer to the paper so it's blotted out blocked out more of the sunshine getting onto the the paper the coated paper um and you get more of a true reading doing that and of course as you as you're making these there's nothing to stop you stopping halfway through and moving some of the objects you've got on the paper then you can get different tones and different effects it's about experimentation like a lot of print making [Music] so that's it really um what i would suggest you do when you're trying this process is you need to do some test pieces to see what ranges of blue you can achieve and how much exposure to the sunlight the daylight that it will will need winter outside is not really the best time to to do this process but it just fits in with um i suppose the lockdown and it's something that people can try at home if they've got the solutions and doesn't need to have a lot of equipment it's just a nice easy quick process so here you can see the um the two dried prints um paper's a bit curled at the moment but you can flat flatten that out um by dampening the paper again slightly putting it in between some i would recommend blocking paper and put some weight on top of it and let it dry for a day or two days and that will flatten it out like it will with any sort of um printed paper on damp paper okay i'll show you that and there's one more thing i wanted to show you before we end this video while we've been doing this i've tried uh something of my own um this is a drawing that i'd done for a screen print and i exposed the screen print and it printed quite nice i was quite pleased with it but i thought i would just see what happened if i use this this drawing as a positive for um for a cyanotype and i did and this is the result so there's two things about this one of them which is quite odd is there's a sort of grid element to the image which is these lines here and i put the paper once i coated it into our drying cabinet for screens and i think what's happened is that it's tightened it it was too hot when i put it in and it's affected the coating uh on the paper but as you can see the the the drawing has come out even though the lines were really fine really delicate um it's worked the image just has worked fine i'm very pleased with it i hope you can see it let me see if i can zoom in a little bit with it i hope it's coming out i'm not sure but there you go um yeah so it's one of those happy accidents or experiments i should say in accidents that that happen every now and then so really that's all for this video um there may be another one in future on more advanced techniques with the cyanotype but i hope it will give you an indication of what you can achieve as a footnote i would say that this these chemicals even though i don't wear um gloves i do constantly wash my hands it's always advisable either to constantly wash your hands or protect yourself with disposable gloves this paper in case you're interested that i printed this one on this is a somerset cream and it's about 300 gram paper just to give a different color to it different feel to the the image okay thank you very much and we'll see you next time

Channel: The Regional Print Centre

Views: 16,361

Keywords: Cyanotype, printmaking, blue print, printing at home, art at home

Id: dsRkYiFLVr4

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021