Today I will talk about toning cyanotype prints. Without doubt Cyanos are beautiful images with an historical look. But the blue color is not everybody´s choice. Personally I like both, blue and toned cyanotypes ......but I tend to the toned the more pictures I´m exposed.
Toning cyanotypes is a little bit tricky. If you would have an precisely defined look you´re at risk to going crazy ;-) .....but you have to go through.
The basic of my style of toning are only a few steps of work. I will share my secrets of toning with tannic acid. The things to do are:
1. watering the dryed cyanotype (5 min)
2. bleaching (30s)
3. watering (5min)
3. watering (5min)
4. toning (from 5 to 15 min)
5. watering (10 min)
The different look of the final images is mostly influenced by the components of the bleaching solution, different chemicals have different results. Let me explain the differents on my example images. As you can see, the final tonal range is very different, more brown-red to brown-black.
Number 1 was bleached in pottasium hydroxide (0.5g/L)Number 2 was bleached in sodium bicarbonate (40g/L)
The time of toning affects more the contrast and darkness of the final toned cyanotype. Longer time results in darker images and sligthly reddish tonal values.
Number 3 and 4 are bleached in ammonia (30% Ammonia 20ml/L) but with different bathing time in the tannic acid solution (3 teaspoon/L),
5 min for number 3 and 15min for number 4.
Thats all for today.
Happy toning :-)
(well, sorry for the facebook/g+ smiley.. und ebenfalls Entschuldigung an meine deutschen Leser, aber die Cyanotypie-Szene ist international und meine Blogstatistik spricht eine deutliche Sprache, 90% der Leser kommen aus dem Rest der Welt, folglich werden alle zukünftigen Beiträge in Englisch erscheinen.)
