Full Cyanotype tutorial, paper, fabric and photos

[Music] what's up this is Ray welcome back hey I know what you're thinking what is that on my man's face it's not what you think it is not a corona mask although you can use it as one this is a cyanotype a few months ago I did a video tutorial on how to do synote ops in camera I don't think anyone's ever done that on YouTube before it's kind of a obscure thing but that video became so popular I got so many comments especially from ladies finally and I got a lot of questions as to what is the cyano type and stuff so because that video was so popular I decided to do a tutorial on cyanotype most people do it on paper or things like that but I'm also going to show you how to do it on fabric as well cyanotype is a chemical process you put the chemical on a surface leave it out in the sunlight the ultraviolet rays turn it into this beautiful blue color there's a little more to it than that but that's the whole point of this video show you how to do it the tools you need and kind of how it's much easier than you think it's easy to do but it's real hard to perfect so uh-oh I'm also going to show you how to do turn your photographs into cyano type look at this a good looking guy right here yeah man so yeah if you're interested in doing cyanotype stick around I'm gonna show you everything pretty much there is to know basically for beginners and if you're curious stick around I'm gonna get right into it okay so before I go any further I want to thank jacquard products they make all kinds of cyanotype kits for anyone that's trying to get into it and when I told them what I was trying to do make these type of tutorials they were kind enough to send me the chemicals and even some cyano type fabric that's already pre treated I'm going to show you how to use that also so thank you jacquard for that and I'll put some links below where you can get this stuff so signer types I think was in sometime in the 1800s it's really mixing two chemicals together and when you mix those chemicals together they become light-sensitive and what you do from there is you may take a brush or a sponge you may sponge it onto a paper for example it's best to use like a watercolor paper or a heavier Kraft type of paper and then you have to dry it first once it's dry you put it out in the Sun what's tricky is depending on how strong the Sun is you may not have to leave it out long you may only need to leave it out five minutes but if it's a cloudy day you may have to leave it out 20 minutes or more so it's a it's a there's an art to it to experimenting seeing how long you need to leave it out some people even do wet cyano types they put it out while it's wet and they may put flowers or different type of things on it where the color of the flowers or whatever will bleach into that wet fabric or paper and they get some beautiful results also so there's a lot of ways to experiment with it but that's the basic as far as the chemicals are concerned and how to use it alright here's another important tidbit how to get the best out of your cyanotypes after you're done your exposure carefully bring it inside in a subdued light area to rinse it I've seen people take the glass off take the flowers off the paper and rinse it in sunlight no you don't want to do that because the sunlight is still acting on that portion of the sanno type that was covered while it's in the Sun rinsing so you're not going to get the perfect white background that you're looking for so always be patient take it inside before you take it apart and rinse it and rinse it well because if you don't if there's any of that silent type material left on this white area eventually in time the Sun will start to act on it the next thing to know is when you rinse it it's not going to be this perfect blue immediately if you let it sit a few days it will oxidize and it will become this perfect blue but what what everyone does is they'll make a bowl of water and put a little bit of hydrogen peroxide in it and what's incredible as soon as you dip it in there you immediately see it turning this dark navy blue it's it's kind of amazing to watch and yeah and after that you just rinse it out and hang it to dry and you're pretty much done they say cyano type doesn't really fade it lasts you know a long time I wouldn't want to watch this in Bleach though but um one thing good thing to know is it it's like a permanent color and it's not going to come out too easily so that's really the basics on how to do sino types okay so when you're doing these it's always a good idea to use some kind of frame or jig or setup to make it easy for that glass to clamp down on top of your Sano type material what I like to use is this frame right here that I got from Michael's the reason I like it it has four Clips built into the back wonder they might accidentally broke off but it makes it so much easy to put the Sano type paper and material in there and just clamp it down and put it out in the Sun and that way as I'm moving it around it won't shift so I'll put a link where you can find this below hopefully some place on Amazon okay so I'm going to show you something real cool you could do with cyanotypes you can actually turn one of your photographs into a cyano type the way you do it is first you open an image in your computer editor then you flip that image into a black and white and then finally you flip the image again into a negative and then you're gonna use these clear acetate sheets I'm going to put a link below where you can get these on Amazon and you put that in your printer and print them as that negative and that's what you're gonna put on top of your silo type material and lay it out in the Sun but to get the best effect before you print it tweak that negative adjust the highlights and the shadows to make sure you have detail in them because what I found is just turning a photo into a negative doesn't make it perfectly applied to a cyano type so you're gonna want to tweak it and also adjust how long you leave it out in the Sun to find the best effect but I was shocked how much detail I was able to get out of these photos in a cyano type so it's definitely something cool and worth trying all right I'm gonna show you something cool let's say you're a beginner you don't want to get too heavy into it you don't want to buy chemicals and all of this stuff you just want to do some experimenting with your kids your card cells these pre treated fabric it's already has this I know type chemical in it it's dried and it's in a foil pack so this comes in a ten pack and what you can do is you can put whatever material you want on top of it lay it out in the Sun as usual rinse it and it's kind of perfect size to put in a little picture frame I'm going to show you one I did right now and I really love this one so much I framed it for my living room it just came out that great so this is a good thing to do for kids but if you look at this what do you notice it's kind of small right at some point if you enjoy doing this you're gonna outgrow this size you're gonna want something bigger so this is what you can do in that case that's what you can get you can step up to these this size these are white bandanas I think I got this at Walmart in a 10 pack and this is like the perfect size to upgrade to experiment with because there's so much more you could do with it and it's light and thin so you're not gonna waste a lot of the seiner type chemical experimenting with this so uh yeah those are some things to keep in mind okay when you put your sign o type out and let it sit in the Sun how do you know when it's done how do you know when it's time to bring it in and rinse and that it was exposed enough you're gonna know it as soon as you put it out there it's gonna start to change color it's going to turn from this yellow to a dark blue and if you leave it out long enough it's gonna start turning to like a brown bronze color and once it reaches that point it's not really going to expose anymore that's kind of the maximum but it's good it's it's good for you to notice the color changes that way you can kind of tell when when it's safe to bring in and after you rinse it if it's not dark enough or if it's too dark you can learn from there how to adjust for the for those in the future so those are some like fine-tuning tips to get the best results all right I'm gonna tell you something really important that I wish I had done when I started doing silent types I wish I had written down the times and the setting of each particular piece of art for example if you put this art out for three minutes and you come back and you rinse it you may look at it and you say man I wish it was darker but if you didn't write it down you won't know how much longer to make that exposure next time you may want to make it five minutes next time but if you didn't keep a record of how long that was you won't know how to improve so there's so many of these that I messed up they were either too dark or too light for that particular reason so that's one quick tip in doing cyanotypes all right so that's my video on cyanotype hopefully you learn something hopefully you benefited hopefully I didn't leave anything out because it's there's so much to talk about so if I did leave anything out definitely leave a question or comment below if you try this definitely reach out to me and maybe send me some pictures of your social media or something on your results I really like to see what other our doing and I didn't realize how popular cyanotype was there's a large community of people doing these and I'm doing them in all kind of different ways they use vinegar all different kind of other chemicals they they add to get different colors and effects and it's it's like unlimited what you can do so yeah man I really had fun doing this thanks to jacquard for providing some of these materials and keep in mind hey no matter what you do for your art whether it's cyanotype photography video painting as always until next time keep it real [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Raychristofer

Views: 66,677

Keywords: Cyanotype, alternative process, diy cyanotype, how to cyanotypes

Id: KCj1saibrJY

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020