I have been experimenting with eco printing the last few weeks. In eco printing , plants are placed between sheets of watercolor paper, stacked and bound in layers and then simmered in hot water to extract the pigments and produce a print made with the plant dyes. Not all leaves produce good prints and I have had good success with oak, willow and rose leaves.
I took some cyanotype coated paper to the beach and made photograms using found objects. The images were developed in the lake water and dried hanging in the trees.
I have been making tri colour gum prints lately. These are from a series titled “Small Stories” and are digital pinhole photographs.
Continuing to print from the archives. The following are zone plate images take with a digital camera. Printed with two layers of ivory black and two layers of burnt umber. The images are perhaps a little less defined than I had intended..
I have been printing some of the images from the “Quiet Light” series as gum bichromate prints. Printed on pre-shrunk and sized Fabriano Artistico watercolour paper using potassium dichromate as the sensitizer. I usually print a weak layer of ivory black followed by a layer of burnt umber and finished with another layer of ivory black.
One of the unexpected benefits of the current situation is I now have the time to go through my archives. I discovered these zone plate images that I took 10 years ago and printed them as cyanotypes this week
The original colour image is separated into RGB channels and a digital negative is made of each channel.
Pre shrunk and sized watercolour paper is coated with a mixture of potassium bichromate, gum arabic and watercolor pigment.
The paper is dried ,exposed to UV light, and developed in plain water for up to an hour.
The steps are repeated for each color until the print is complete.
In this body of work I use a modified cyanotype process to create photograms of botanical material. The process incorporates added heat,moisture, and a very long exposure.
The plant material is sandwiched between the damp cyanotype coated paper and a sheet of glass and placed inside an insulated box in the sun for hours or days. This miniature greenhouse causes the cyanotype chemistry to breakdown and interact with the plant material, to produce colour shifts and patterns which are unpredictable, magical and create an alternative impression of nature.
