9 Years Ago

Trying Something Different: Cyanotype

My actual day job these days involves (among a lot of other things) running an after school program for people between kindergarten and seventh grade. It's a fairly small group, so in addition to the usual homework stuff and four-square, we also end up doing a lot of hands on activities. Last week some of the regulars had seen Jurassic Park for the first time, so we went on a bit of a dinosaur kick. Next week we're going to play with "Sunpaper". I've experimented some with it and was able to produce an interesting image of a badminton shuttlecock Does anyone have any thoughts on how to deal with this stuff, and anything else that would be interesting to take an image of beyond the usual leafs?

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Jeffery Johnson

9 Years Ago

Hum not sure as I have never experimented but what about sand dollars, flowers, blades of grass or lace.

Elena Nosyreva

9 Years Ago

Hi Joshua,

You can make a digital negative for cyanotype process from almost any photo. I'm not sure how the "sun paper" works, I usually use self made UV sensitive solution to apply to the paper.

More info here:

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/cyanotype/preparing-your-image-for-cyanotype-printing
http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/negatives/curve-corner-photoshop-curves

-Elena Nosyreva

Jane Linders

9 Years Ago

I've been doing cyanotypes for years and love hand coating my own watercolor paper. I've made a couple of sales of my cyanotypes on FAA as well. Folks seem to be embracing this "old" printing process.

Sold this one a couple of months ago on FAA:

Joshua House

9 Years Ago

Sunpaper is a brand name of paper that's been pretreated with the chemicals for making cyanotypes, it simplifies the process for group settings.

Elena Nosyreva

9 Years Ago

Thank you Joshua,

I was saying, I'm not sure that digital negatives will work with sun paper. It seems that in doesn't have wide tonal range (from dark blue to white). But for photograms it should be OK.

_Elena Nosyreva

Edward Fielding

9 Years Ago

Years ago I wrote an article about it for Camera and Darkroom magazine. After it was published the company sent me a big roll of the stuff. Its basically the same as blueprints I believe.

You can make your own to - http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/cyanotype/blueprint-to-cyanotypes

Bring a lot of kitchen stuff - flippers, glasses, bottles

Gary Fossaceca

9 Years Ago

Hey Joshua! I used to teach an afterschool program for at risk kids and we did a TON of cyanotyping. Have you tried having them make their own negatives on a computer and then printing them out? I used transparencies from the local art store and had the students bring in their favorite images. We scanned them in, used photoshop to reverse the image and print them out. The kids loved it because it was all their own project and they are good with computers as well.

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