The Wet Cyanotype Process - alternative photography

1. Intro: Well, hey there, my name is Ben. I'm an artist and educator and welcome to this class, the wet cyanotype process. So the wet cyanotype process is a pretty simple variation on the classic cyanotype process. If you remember with cyanotype after you coat the paper with chemistry, then you have to let it dry. Once it's dry, then you can go ahead and print. But in the West cyanotype process, you're allowed to print when it's still wet. Or you can even take a dried prepared sensitized paper and you can re-wet it water with vinegar. And you can add all manner of other things. And the truth is, it doesn't ruin the print. It just adds in some somewhat unpredictable textures into the final print. And so really I want to start with saying that this process is extremely experimental. This is not for the faint of heart. If you just like to have your prints turn out exactly the same way every time there's going to be mistakes made. There's going to be trial and error, there's going to be experimentation. And to me that is the absolute blast of this process. So on the simple end, you'll be able to make prints like this that start getting some various textures into the more dense areas of the print. And on the more extreme end, you'll be making prints like this. You can see there's some other colors. Add it in here. There's all kinds of crazy textures, kind of plasticky, watery textures, bubbles, all kinds of things going on. And this is all the result of being extremely experimental in the process of adding things, adding liquids and other dyes to the process that change the final look of your prints. And the great thing about this process is I'm only going to be scratching the surface here because as many things as we can try in this video, you can experiment with a million things more. So really learning this opens a whole new world of possibilities for your cyanotype prints. I'm really excited to teach you how to go through this process and to see the creative results you end up with. Let's jump in the next video where we talk about the supplies you will need for this process. 2. Supplies: Hey there, welcome back to this class on wet cyanotype. In this video, we're gonna be talking about some of the supplies you need. And keep in mind that this is not necessarily a comprehensive list because as I stated in the intro, an inherently extremely experimental process, which means you should feel free to kind of try any materials that you think might change the overall aesthetic of the Princeton. And once you see me walk through this process, I think you'll kind of understand what things would or might not work to enhance this process. So let's go ahead and dive in. First step is of course, the actual cyanotype materials, right? The chemistry, the paper stuff to mix it with. At this point, I kind of assume that you're getting comfortable. I've really enjoyed using this Jaccard kit. You can get rid off of Amazon for less than 15 bucks. It works great. It gives you a lot of the sensitizer to work with. So you have a lot to experimentally, which is great. You're also going to need some just containers to be mixing things and holding the chemistry as you're coding or paper. Of course, you'll need some watercolor paper. I don't have any in front of me because I coded at all and it's drying. But you'll need some good-quality watercolor paper. And if this feels too rushed, well, I recommend jumping back to my 101102103 courses where I really cover all of these steps of how to coat cyanotype the first time in, in much more detail. So we're beyond that right now we're into this experimental went process. So get out your cyanotype chemistry, and then let's grab some of these other supplies. Okay. Inherently in the name of whet, cyanotype is wet, right? You're going to need some water and you're going to need some ways to apply it. Now you can, of course, just like dip your fingers in water and spritz it on. You can use something like a spray bottle and atomizer that's going to really give a fine mist. You could brush on on if you wanted to. It really whatever you have on hand is good. And along with that, sometimes people experiment with mixing in varying concentrations of vinegar as well. So just good old white vinegar will give you some more things to experiment with. But certainly that's not essential. And along those lines of some wet things you'll be adding is some good old soap, liquid soap, dish soap. Anything that's going to have bubbles will work well because essentially you're just going to be adding those bubbles to the print, which we'll be adding some texture and you'll see how that looks later on. So you'll need some bubbles, you'll need a little bit of water in a container that you can be making those bubbles in. And let's move on to some of the dry materials you can add. Two classics are tumor and paprika. Tumor of course gives off that really nice yellow color and will die. Everything it touches pepper get is a little less strong, but it will leave that reddish orange color behind. And what's important with all this stuff I'm talking about now is that these are not chemical processes, these are dying. So. The color that they are as the color they're going to leave. And so this lets you plan in advance. And it also kind of gives you a broader range of things to choose from. You could choose plant pigments, right? If there's something, some, something growing in your garden that has a color to it. You're going to add it to your print and it would leave that color. So as I said, this is extremely experimental and so anything that's going to leave color, you could potentially add to your print. But two easy ones. Again, tumor, paprika. If you don't have peppery gone hand, you could also use something like chili powder that also would have that kind of reddish tone to add. You can also of course add coffee that's going to add some browns to it. And, you know, I wouldn't recommend something too good because I'd rather be drinking good coffee. And you can do something. Take a page from the book of some watercolors and use salt. Now, the large crystals sea salt is ideal. But even if you just have table salt, it's going to do something to create a texture in your final prints. And so again, you can use all of these, you can use one of these, you can use something else that you've heard of that might affect the kinda of liquid properties of the cyanotype paper. It's really up to you for experimentation. And the last thing I'm going to be using is some cling wrap. Okay, So some good old plastic wrap. Again, this is another way that we're gonna be kinda of adding some texture, maybe isolating different portions of the print. So any plastic that the sun will still be able to print it through is going to work well. And what are we going to be printing? Well, I am going to be doing some experimenting with doing negative prints that I've printed off on acetate. But generally you're going to see this technique with printed objects, right? With plant matter, with other types of objects. And so that's what I'm going to be focusing this course on. Okay, I'm actually shooting this on the first full day of spring. And so I went outside and just grabbed kind of a mishmash greenery. And I'm going to be using this in order to make our prints and just a variety of combinations. So really whatever you have laying around and you can make some beautiful compositions from amazingly humble materials. And then last, you are going to need the printing materials. You're going to need a frame of some kind. You're going to need to print either outside or in my case, I actually have my printing box that I made. And if you're interested in being able to print more inside print, even if it's raining or anything like that. I highly recommend that video that was how to print with inexpensive UV lighting. And I really enjoyed making that. I, and I absolutely have been able to do more printing since I've made that printing box. And here's one caveat for printing. Normally I recommend using just a cheap frame. And that works really, really well for most cyanotype. But with this method, since we're dealing with wet material more, there's going to be more liquid. Dealing with a cheap frame that might have a cardboard back or something like that, just isn't going to hold up as well. So if you have a sheet of glass, you'll definitely need that. And some type of wood or a little bit more solid base that's going to come in handy. And so you would use that maybe some clips to clip everything together. As with all of this stuff, no one thing is essential. All just kinda figuring out how to make your workflow, your, your process as easy as possible. For me, I think that means I'm going to just be working with a piece of glass and a piece of wood and sandwiching everything together. But, you know, whatever you have on hand will probably work. So that's what we have. You know, this is an incredibly eclectic group of things. And I'm going to try to be sort of breaking this down into different categories of stuffs so we can see how individual pieces affect the final prints. And then at the end, we're going to be putting a lot of the methods together to try to get some interesting final parenthesis. Let's go ahead and jump to the next video where we walked through the basics of cyanotype. I'll see you there. Hi. 3. Basic Wet Cyanotype: All right, Welcome back. In this video, we're going to be looking at in the most foundational differences between what happens when you try to do a wet cyanotype process with the chemistry before it has even dried, once or after it has dried and then you rewet it. So we're going to be kind of comparing and contrasting those two methods to see if you like, you know, kinda working quickly, coding, putting things together and exposing it. Or if you want to let it, let the solution completely dry. And then you can kinda control things a little bit more to it with the final results by rewetting it before you expose it. We're going to look at the difference. I'm also going to look at the difference between what happens if you try to use a negative versus using some plants to see kind of how you like those results. So first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and cope some paper very quickly and then set that up to expose. And after that, then I will go ahead and take some paper I have already coded and re-wet it. So let's go ahead and dive in. So for these first two, it's gonna go ahead. I have just a tad that of this chemistry leftover as you can see. And just making sure that it's mixed. And I'm just gonna do a quick and hopefully thorough coat. And remember it with a normal cyanotype process, you would be letting these get bone dry or else it messes with the exposure. And here we're doing the opposite. We are purposefully doing these really wet. We're not going to let them dry. And we're gonna see what happens, which is kind of a heighth of experimentation, which can be infuriating. It can be fun. And we're going to find out, okay, These are nice and saturated. There's plenty of liquid on there, so it's a nice kind of thick coat, if you will. And one, I'm going to try just putting this negative kinda directly on here. And I have no idea what that is gonna do. Let me go ahead and move these out of the way real quick while I pull up this. Either way, always be careful when you're dealing with sheets of glass that you don't cut yourself. So that is going to be print number 1, point number 2. I'm gonna go ahead and just compose quickly. Some of these burns. Grab that glass. I'm going to be sandwiching. Entire thing. Okay, I wanna make sure that's nice and tight. So let me grab a clip here and we'll get started. So at this point, this is ready to go, get exposed. And I'm going to do that as quickly as possible here. This video is not about how to do exposure, any of that. You just expose it the normal amount of time. There's really no tricks to that. So I'm an expose it and we'll jump back once we see what's going on. Okay? And while we are waiting for that first set to expose, we're going to work on our second set. And so these are papers I coded awhile ago, a few days, and they are bone dry. And so now we're going to see, is there a difference between what we just did with the the Fresh Prince that are not dry yet versus ones that have completely dried and now we are rewetting. So in order to wet them, I'm just going to be using this spray bottle that I filled with some water. And I'm just going to be doing kind of a light mist to just re-wet the surface. I'm not doing anything tricky with this one in terms of controlling where it goes or anything, I'm just doing kind of an evil spirits over each. Again on one, I'm going to be putting a negative just to see what the result is. And on this side, this time I'm going to go for well, that are rosemary. Okay. Putting that on. And now pushing this down flattened. And this one's since my printer is actually being used, I'm going to go ahead and place this out in the sun to see what happens. So wish me luck. All right, welcome back. I have exposed and developed all these prints. And so now I just wanted to take a very quick look. In the final video, I'm going to be going through an analysis of all these prints and talk about them in more depth. But I just want to give you a quick peek at what came out. So first, we have the ones that were initial wet prints, right? They were never dried. There were just the chemistry was coded and they were made wet. First, the negative, the negative. And clearly this is a little bit underexposed, but also there's like a weird texture going on it. And I'll be honest, the negative ones I was not a fan of and I don't think I'm going to do anymore for this, the wet process with negatives. The only way I can describe this texture is that it's, well, it's sort of like it exaggerates the texture of the paper. And it's not, it's not a good look. And so I would not continue with this. It it left like pockmarks and it's just not very good. Okay, but that was the, the kind of non dried chemicals. But then very different results for the other one. Okay. You can see if you get on in this detailed, extremely fluid, There's a nice smooth blue to the tone. We have a little bit of that again, where like the glass was touching the paper and we see that texture of the paper a bit more. And then right around the edges, I think you can see it's very reminiscent of like watercolor, right? There's all this liquid that ended up pulling up on the surface and there's these little like Penta liquid tendrils bleeding out. And it's really, it's a nice effect, but of course it's a little happenstance, right? It's not something that you can necessarily control. So that's going to be happening a lot in this process, I think. And so we'll kinda track how the different methods we choose to use will affect how much control we have. Now we have the paper that was coded, dried, and then just rewet with a spray bottle. Again, we have the negative. This one, the exposure was better. This one actually I ended up printing out the side. It's a little bit dark even. But again, we have all this texture in here and it's like really this gritty texture. And I think what happened was it was where the glass or the negative was pressing against the paper, created all these contact points. But then anywhere where it wasn't pressing directly against the paper, kinda suck that chemistry away. And so it's just not a very appealing looking print. It's very gritty and I don't know, not very good. And also on top of that, the the emulsion on the acetate itself got stuck to the paper and ended up ripping up part of the paper, which you can see right here. So that's just as not my favorite. But then we can say, I mean, look how rich that blue Is, that came out really nice. So this is again, just a Dried print, ended up splitting a couple times. And so we get this really nice contrast in terms of the white area versus that rich blue. And then in here, right, we get all these little droplet, kind of a watery effects in the background. And again, that's where these word like these little drops that were down on the paper and this is how it ended up on. So that's something, I think that's a really nice texture. Kinda looks like distant stars or something like that. And so we will definitely be experimenting with that. Some more, some kind of controlled areas of water droplets, not just getting the entire thing wet. Alright, so that was our initial experiments between using wet chemicals that were never drive versus dry chemicals that were then re-wet. In our next video, we're going to be testing out sort of what you'd call the wet add-ins k the the vinegar, the soap, the plastic, and seeing how those affect our final prints. So I'll see you in the next video. 4. Wet Add-Ins: All right, Welcome back to this course on the wet cyanotype process. We've already looked at the basics of what a wet process. I know that can be. In this video, we're going to look at the wet add-ins that you can experiment with. Notably, you can add in vinegar, you can add in so and you can also put on plastic wrap that will sort of modify the aesthetics of those things. So let's kinda do some experimentation on two different prints. We will see what the results are. Ok? So I have my two prints again, these are already coded in a dried and now they are ready for us to kind of experiment with them. And I think what we will do is one, I will focus primarily on water and vinegar. The other one I will have some soap. And then I'm also going to be using some of the plastic wrap, maybe on parts of one. So let's go ahead and get started. Start. I'm just going to go ahead and kinda spritz. It seems like it's not something you necessarily want to just get the entire thing. What you can do that of course, but you don't have to. And I'm experimenting with the approach of what you'd say less is more, right? Okay. Go ahead and do that. And maybe you want to use as well. Okay. So that was just water adding that on. And now I have just some vinegar. I'm going to be just kinda dripping on various areas. And some plastic wrap. More or less just going to kind of not try to control this very much. I'm just going to put this down over the top and know what I think. Maybe I'm gonna do one more spritz with some water. Just work. Makes sure we're dealing with enough moisture here. K. But that down more or less covering the print, but nothing too fancy. Okay, now I'm going to concentrate over here. This one, I'm going to do more. Gonna maybe leave it dry when I put this down. Then I'm going to add some soap. So I just have this hands up and need to create bubbles. Make sure you don't suck in just using sterile technique. Of course, these can't stay up like this. I need some. Like I'm back in elementary school with that bubble ink project that you guys might remember. And just try to basically cover the entire print with some of these bubbles. Really have no idea. Sure, you could get in different ratios of soap to water to give different size bubbles. Getting some fairly big ones here. We've got to give us a little spritz, get rid of some of these bubbles. And I'm also going to be putting a little bit of plastic kind of haphazardly on top of here. Okay. Now it's time for the glass. Make sure everything is getting pressed together. And it's time to print the right. I have these prints that are fresh out of being developed, but I wanted to show you real quick. Again, I'm going to go over these in a little bit more detail at the end of this class. But I just wanted to show you real quick. Here's the one that is had some vinegar mixed in and you can see like there's sort of discolored, liquid looking discoloration spots that are kind of thrown in there. And also I had the plastic on top of here. And you can see, let's see one area like right in here. You can kinda see the folds of the plastic against the surface of the paper. So overall, I would say this doesn't, it's not my favorite affected so far, but I can see how this would be really interesting in combination with some other stuff. It's definitely different looking than when it was just spritz it with more water, the vinegar. And that plastic games are really interesting flow, I think since the texture of the plastic could be manipulated, you could do something pretty intentional with the types of lines it creates, which is interesting. And the second one we did was the bubbles. So let's see how this looks and see this came out. And there's really a strong bubbled texture on there, of course, that makes it look very liquid. And I just really like how that came out. There's lots of detail in there. And again, on its own, you might say, well this is a little 10 and it certainly adds a little dimension to otherwise what would just be a silhouette print. But what I'm looking forward to is now putting this in combination of saying, all right, we have the bubble, we have the plastic wrap, maybe a little bit of vinegar. And now in our next video, we're going to look at say, well what happens when we add in these dry pigment type things? What does that change? And then finally, we'll see what happens when we combine all these techniques together. So in the next video, we're going to look at when we're adding these pigments. So tumor and have Rica and salt and other stuff like that to add some moments of color. And essentially we're starting to dip our toes into mixed media with this, which is pretty exciting. So I'll see you in the next video. 5. Dry Add-Ins: All right, Welcome back to this video where we're going to be dealing with adding some dried pigments to the wet sign of type process and seeing how that affects things. One important thing to note here is that we are definitely crossing a line over to what you'd call more mixed media, right? What we're adding, not a chemical process. These are just pigments, right? These are colors where adding in. Now they're gonna change a little bit because of the water, because of the fluid we're adding. But this is not part of the cyanotype chemistry process that you've been familiar with. And so what that means is really the sky's the limit, anything that has pigment to it, you can add, whether that's flower petals or spices, or I even just realize I had some, some tea that I could add that would add some more color that we're going to try out. So you can really experiment here with things that will change the color and texture of these prints. So let's go ahead and dive right in. Now. Okay. First one I'm going to add is some turmeric. Stuff is really potent. And I'm just so I'm just gonna do a bit of a sprinkling. So I'm just gonna kinda leave randomly around. Okay, just a touch day. This is one of those things I don't think we want to over do it. We might not know what overdoing it looks like quite yet, but I think we'll we'll get there. Okay, and let's start adding in some of my elements here. Try to do some kind of composition. This. Okay? I'm also with this one. I'm going to go ahead and do it a little bit of water on here. Remember, of course this is also going to do a bit of coffee with this one. So see what's going on. Of course, this would copy with strike me as something that needs to be a bit wetter in order to have too much effect. So I'm going to need to go back and change that. And I don't want to just randomly sprinkles. So I'm gonna kinda change the density some areas that are somewhat just a little something like that. And again, just do a specially make sure I get. Some of these areas saturated, other ones. Kinda like the the bubbled up nature that it gives out. The other thing I wanna do is do a bit of the plastic wrap. I'm not gonna do it over the whole thing I'm gonna do it just differ here and actually I like the crinkled up raft. Look that I got on some of these others. So I'm gonna kinda try to make sure we get some of that still. All right. I think that one's pretty much done. Grad. Let me grab another one of these. And they're so now with this one, I'm putting down the plants first. And so some areas will be relatively masked from this. This is the paprika I'm adding. Go ahead and do a bit of going to experiment with some salt here. Now the salt, of course, is going to have the most effect when it's very saturated. So I might have to add a bit more water here. And then last I have this hibiscus tea. Well, it's actually a tea blends, so it's not just hibiscus and there I think would be better if it was. But we're going to just try it out. It had discussed has quite a lot of pigment in there. So once again, I want to go over this and just make sure those areas that I just sprinkled our wet enough. It's certainly interesting blend of smells I'm getting there. And once again, I'm going to do a little bit of plastic wrap, not over the whole thing. But in this case I think I'm going to go, maybe you just read over this lower part as well. So I'm going to crinkle this up, make sure I get some interesting things going on. And there we go. Oh great. Now we're ready for the glass. Press things down as much as possible. And we'll go right into the printer for about 15 or so minutes. And we'll see the results would get here. Er, Let's take a look at these finished prints out as first one was to mock and coffee and a little bit of plastic wrap. And here is our initial results. Again, we're going to look at these kind of all later on in another video, but just, these are just quickly what you can expect. What I like about this one is the tumor. The tumor comes across really nice. Of course it's a beautiful yellow contrast to the blue. So, you know, that's, that's a highlight. I also like what I did with the plastic here, right? It wasn't overbearing. You can hopefully see it down in these areas, right? It just lends some extra textural elements, but it doesn't have to cover the entire print. When I don't like the coffee, the coffee that I put on here. It just well, especially where it went into the white areas right here. It it just made it money, right? It just turned the white paper to not white. And I'm not a huge fan of that. Maybe I could try putting more of it out into the more open and blue area and see what happens. It certainly would create some texture, if not color, but not my favorite result with the copy. So the other one, this one is where I'd tried the paprika and salt and some hibiscus as well as plastic on some of it as well. And let's see the results right here. Okay, so as you can see, we did not add very much in terms of color. None of these were strong. And in fact, I think the paprika left pretty much nothing, which I've never used paprika before myself. And so the only thing I can imagine It is one, I know that paprika is ancient and so maybe it's just too far gone to lend any color. So maybe some higher grade, newer paprika would could work. Or maybe there's other similar things like chili powder or things like that that would give off a red tone. The salt, the salt there is some texture and you'll look at it closer. But since it was just regular like table salt size grains instead of the large crystals that a lot of it just dissolved. And so there was some textural things, but not the dramatic results that you'll see from the large rock salt crystals with, you may have seen that with watercolor before. So that's something, you know, having that specific material on hand would make it a little better. And then they'll hibiscus, of course, I just threw that in at the last second. And when I first pulled it out of the printer and looked at it, you know, it's this very deep red. But by the time I watched it, a really, really faded. The area that it was supposed to be was like up here. You can see it's not quite the same blue as the others, but it's also not red. So again, in the right context and the right area, maybe that would work well. But with what we did right here, that really wasn't my favorite results. So what I liked best was the the tumor. And what I liked least was probably the coffee. And the other thing that the paprika really didn't give any results at all. So maybe we'll have to experiment with something else a little bit. In the next video, I'm going to kind of combine all of these methods and tried to make my own to finished prints. To use these the best of my ability to make a nice composition. Use them for the strengths that they have in terms of each of these materials we've looked at. So I'll see you in the next video. 6. Creative Printing: All right, Welcome back to this video where we're gonna kinda combine all these different materials and techniques we've been experimenting with in trying to make, to finish prince with this cyanotype process. And for your experimentation, you might have found some different results than I did because of the specific materials you're using. And now it's the time to go forth trying to think, how do you need to layer these elements? How well do they need to be? How do they need to be arranged in order to get your best composition? So let's go ahead and dive right in. Try to get some nice results. Rosemary over here. Remix the spread of the stack. Can be a little wet. For me. It seems like this process is about sort of trying to get the right amount of control. You certainly don't want to just spread everything everywhere, but you do have to let the process work. And it's finding that balance of what's going to look right in the end. Seeing how things are really going to end up blending together. So I'll really important bubbles here. What I'm going for with this one is. A little bit more of this denser textural type things like bubbles and the salt. Those types of elements down here near the bottom. Try to get that kind of spreading up. With some degree of control. There we go. And then kinda letting it open up a little bit on the upper part. And we're going to little bit more. The hibiscus that didn't lend that much color. So I'm not that concerned with that. And do a bit more of a tumor right on this spot here. And just really kinda doubts that There's a bit of a pool here. Less I am going to go for some plastic. Especially up on this side. How much control I can get with the Cretan, get some sort of interesting lines. Okay. All right there. All right, let's start attention for this one. Since I tried to do like controlled regions with this one, I'm going to try this one much more of like an even surface. So I'm actually going to start with some of the salt. Yes, I realize I'm going to do some plants kind of above the plastic here, which won't get pressed down, but we'll add in some areas of lightness. One more. Okay. Okay. Yes, so this one, I'm just gonna kinda let the let things kinda happen more the way they're going to happen. So I'm gonna put down materials and how things interact, react with just how they're going to be. Maybe I'll go a little heavier down here. This is the hibiscus. Good. I wish this was straight hibiscus. I'd probably get a much more vivid result button. At that point. It is what it is. I'm going to do a bit of vinegar on this one. Little spots, especially along the edge. I think I don't want any thing too drastic. Go. I'm going to add some bubbles to this. You can say I've a lot, a lot of bubbles, they're going crazy. Okay? And now I'm going to start actually trying to layer in some of these materials are around after that. Actually. And scenarios up here. I'm going to think I'm going to do plastic on this one and just kinda see, see what we can see here. So the cracked glass. And we'll do the same. We've been doing that a minute or so, It's ocher. And we'll see the results. We get. Those two prints are exposed and developed and now they are drying. We're not going to look at them right now because in our next video we are going to take a look at all the prints we've done. Talk about pros cons techniques that worked or didn't, what we would do next time, how we could improve on this process to make some beautiful prints. So I'll see you in the next video. 7. Final Analysis: Hey there and welcome back. In this final video in this class on the wet cyanotype process. I trust that you are having fun experimenting with this. And in this video we're going to look through all the prints we've done, talk about pros cons, things, we've learned, things we would adjust if we were to continue doing this process. And again, I just want to reiterate, this is an extremely experimental process, even if you think you know what affects the materials you're adding to your printer are going to have, It's still going to be a little crazy, right? It's going to be difficult to really control, but you have to embrace that with this process, right? It is part of the wet cyanotype process to let the material let the process have some control. So if you embrace that, I think it's really fun. You can get some uniquely beautiful results. But you're not going to be able to reproduce and uniquely beautiful results. So there's a frustration with that. And sometimes I feel that, but at the same time, I think it is worth kind of opening up this avenue of printmaking to yourself. So let's go ahead and look at the first prints I made. These were sort of the control of the experiment just to see how the process works. And so this was the, the first print just made on chemistry that hadn't been dried yet. And then we had this silhouette print that was made from the chemistry that hadn't yet dried yet. And while I think this print, especially as good, the other one is a little underexposed and I wasn't a big fan of how the negatives worked at all. The kind of just the workflow of needing to get it wet and then quickly work to get stuff on top. I wasn't a big fan of. And so that's why for the rest of this class, I did the rewetting process because it didn't feel like any visual gains were made by using this method. And so it wasn't worth the hectic quickly do stuff before it dried. The re-wetting gave yourself a lot more time. And so let's look at those. The first of the rewetting. This was again with a negative. It added that weird like paper texture. If you were dealing with perfectly smooth paper and you might get different results. But since my watercolor paper is cold press that has that texture to it. And that texture came through here also. If you remember the, the emulsion of the acetate that I print on, actually stuck to the paper and tore it. So again, Negatives, not a big fan of how that worked with a wet process. But here we have the rewetting process. And there's some spots where instead of the whole thing getting wet, there's some kind of speckles, which is really nice. But then also it's just makes for a nice dark print as well. With a little touch of fluidity, maybe. Look. So just the very simple process of rewetting and printing with the silhouette type prints can yield some beautiful results. But then we got into, all right, what if we add some more experimental materials? So we have a couple where we were adding some kind of wet materials. This one this one is where we added some vinegar to various parts of the print. Of course we went it down with some water as well, and then we added plastic wrap on top. And what I like about this print, again, there's a strong sense of that fluid nearness and we're going to see that through really all of our prints that you can really tell it's a wet cyanotype process and it's very fluid, which, you know, if we're gonna go through the work of doing this process, I want to know that there's moments up here where we added the vinegar, where it's starting to like bleach out the color and an overall it seemed like areas where we added vinegar. It did pull out some of that rich blue. And so you can use that to create some areas of highlight or contrast. I think that's an interesting way to go with the vinegar. And I do like in this area we have a small example right up here of where the plastic wrap is coming into contact with the surface of the print. And, and I, I do like the aesthetic. They're essentially to me, it's, it's adding in some, some texture, but it's not just like grainy texture. It is that linear sort of pattern looking type of look that the plastic leaves. And I think there's, there's a lot of possibilities of using that type of pattern inside a print, at least for my own aesthetic. So I did like that, the look of that plastic a lot. And so we use that a lot. The next one here, we use bubbles, right? We just got the sum. Bubbly, added those bubbles on top. And we put it the, the plant down and we put the bubbles on top. And so you can see it's like really nice and clean inside, just a few little lines in here. But then the outside we have all this crazy bubble texture. And as long as you like the look of that and I get looks like the bubble, the surface of water. Then I think that's an aesthetic. You're really going to like the bubbles. They worked very easily. Of course you can't control it. The most control you could have would be to say, sometimes you make large bubbles, sometimes you do a different mixture of the soap and use smaller bubbles. And you tried to kind of draw with them, but it wasn't necessarily that easy to work with. It was pretty messy dealing with the bubbles. So there's that drawback, I guess you'd say. And also with this, we did put the plastic wrap over it. And you can see a few areas where that kind of introduced some more straight lines or texture. And actually I kinda think that's an interesting contrast between the very cellular structure of the bubbles in contrast with the lines from the plastic wrap. So. I really did enjoy dealing with the bubbles, but I think that is the most release of control in this process. And so you have to be willing to do that. All right, next, we started experimenting with adding some of the dry pigments. So let's take a look at those first one here, we experimented with the coffee and tumor. A tumor is a classic because that yellow pigment is really contrasty against the blue. And you can see the areas in here where you can, where you can see that yellow comes there and you can see that it's really, it does add that color contrast then makes for more visual interests. Of course, we added in some coffee and the coffee one, it didn't die that much. But really the effect it had was take that white and make it not what rate and made it very light tan and, and that generally as to lower contrast and I'm not the biggest fan of that. So I wasn't the biggest fan of the coffee. We didn't do some plastic in controlled areas. You can see some of that texture, like right in here, which again, I think is a nice touch to have at least on some parts. And then our next one, right, we test it out a few more dry ingredients. We tested out some salt, we tested out some hibiscus and some paprika. And this one, well, there's not a whole lot of effect of the colors. And I'll come to why I think that is in a second. But we added essentially quite a bit of paprika down here and there is nothing. You can't even tell that there was anything put there. The hibiscus. Again, this was a blend t so it wasn't just hibiscus that we put on there. There was other things mixed in, but there is some coloration. It's certainly not as vivid as you might imagine. It's not that like rich purple. There's just some like a darkish blue mixed in with a lighter blue. And then the salt the salt. Again, I was not using the large crystals salt. I think if you did that, you would see more of the traditional effect that, that has when people use it with watercolor and things like that. Which can be really interesting since I was just using standard table salt. You see little elements like down here. Let's see if we can. There we go. Where? Again, it just adds a textural element where the, the, kinda the fluidity ends up getting messed with. And I like that look, you know, I like those kind of layered textures. One thing I will point out with this print over all that I noticed that the, the silhouette is pretty soft. And that's sort of a disadvantage of once we start layering all these materials on, by the time we put the glass on, things aren't getting pressed really very tight to the paper at all. And so we end up with these very ethereal prints. And so I think that's something that maybe we, you can learn or take away from this is you have to think about what sort of print are you trying to make, right? Is the silhouette of the plant really important? Well then that needs to go down at first. And, and maybe to an agreed, you want that a little bit less wet because the more wet you get it, the software, those edges are probably going to be, they're going to bleed away. And, but if you like, these layered kind of ethereal shapes with the textures and the colors getting mixed around and treating it almost more like a mixed media painting, then you can just kind of have at it. Okay, so with no further ado, we're going to look at our last two prints where I tried to take all the things we're looking at in the other ones and just make prints that I'd like to be a little more intentional with the layout and with the control of materials. So let's go ahead and look at those. Okay, so this first one here, I'll give you a view of it for a second. Okay. I use tumor, OK. I use bubbles, I use plastic wrap. Course. I use some controlled spray from the spray bottle. And i'm, I'm pretty happy with how this came out. The, the moments of color from the turmeric come through and just add for some nice contrast. I especially like kinda splash yellow effect that I ended up getting up here. And the what I think, what I was going for with these and what I think I at least started to get results was having areas that were more dense with texture, right? So I have the plastic wrap, I have the bubbles, I have all of that going on down here. I still got some nice clean highlights on the, from the plant silhouette, which is good contrast. Then by the time you get up here, there's a little less texture, but it's a little more chaotic though, right? That's spray effect really comes through strong. The yellow of course highlights that. But then in the areas that are just blue, there isn't really a texture there, right? That's just soft. And so that's kinda what I was trying to create, sort of regions of control. So actually I think from all the prints I've done, I would say that this one is probably my favorite. And with this one, you know, I tried to go more for that overall surface texture, right? To just kind of evenly spread the materials over most of the surface. So I did splattered some turmeric. I did quite a bit of salt. I did the bubbles and I did plastic wrap over parts of it as well. I did vinegar at at a few different spots on the corners. And well, a few things I noticed. One, I think I went a little overboard with the vinegar, so the whole print got a little lightened. More than I'd like. You can see the actual exposure at this blue down here, but with so much vinegar and mixed in on the others, it got a little too light for my liking. And the overall textures that are happening here are, could be nice, but I think it's just a little too chaotic to me. I prefer the more controlled results, the more controlled placement of these different textures here. So that's one of my takeaways that there's kind of a world of possibilities of things you could add to this, but you still need to have kind of that degree of control, that degree of restraint in order to get the best results or at least the results that I like the most. Other things, right? You can think about really, anything that is going to be in contact with the liquid is going to create some sort of different visual effect, right? That's what the plastic is essentially just creating points where that liquid collects and then that changes how the cyanotype prints. So again, if you have anything that's clear and the thing that the sun can print through that is also going to create some sort of pattern, I think like netting or something like that might be really interesting. You know, fishing line, things like that could be interesting. Anything that's going to pull the liquid on the surface is, has a lot of potential to create unique visuals. And there's, of course, a lot of experimentation needed with that. The last thing I would say, and this is something that I, as I continue to work with wet cyanotype, I need to do better with myself and that is you have to give the dry pigments more time. So I did a 20 minute exposure inside my UV printing box with these prints. And the exposure of the cyanotype is pretty good, especially in the areas where the vinegar didn't mess with things too much. However, the pigments need more time than that. And so what people do is they expose for their normal exposure 20 minutes, say, and then they let it sit in a non exposure place for, you know, an hour or a day to let those pigments from the tumor or the paprika, whatever it is, really soak in. Because since that's not a photochemical process, really the only process you have is time. So that's something that if you want richer colors to come through, I think you're going to need to extend what your print time is, even though your exposure would be the same, you need to let it sit and rest on the surface of the paper for longer. And that's again, that's just something with the process. You kind of need to find the balance of how much color is coming through versus how long of a print you want this the big. So for instance, with this one, you know, I, I like the results of what I got, but I think if the yellow up here was twice as strong, It would be better. So those are my takeaways. I really do love this process that absolutely it gets to the roots of cyanotype with how experimental it is. If there's any of this cyanotype process that you're sketchy on or you don't remember, I recommend jumping back into the 1011213 classes I have on Skillshare. Thanks so much for joining me. Really makes sure that you share your project. I'd love to see your results. I'd love to hear questions if you have any, and to be kind of learning together as Thanks so much, I'll see you in the next class.