Simply beautiful

© Andreas Reh    toned Cyanotype on Lukas Osaka 300g/m²,  30x40cm

Pure beauty

© Andreas Reh    toned Cyanotype on Lukas Osaka 300g/m²,  30x40cm

Lisa

© Andreas Reh    toned Cyanotype on Lukas Osaka 300g/m²,  30x40cm

Black is beautiful !

Finally, after one year of "try and error" with cyanotypes, toned with tannic acid, gallic acid, tea, or coffee....or blahblahblah.......I´ve got it.....my first really "black" Cyanotype on my new favorite paper "Lukas OSAKA". Normally the toning process results in a lot of weired color cast like greenish-violet-brown-blue-black colors, but yeah....on this new paper I´ve got a beautiful clean warm-black tone. In this case I toned the wet unbleached cyano with tannic acid immediately after the washing process. And it works..many thanks to the "Schoellerhammer" company for this beautiful watercolor paper!

© Andreas Reh    toned Cyanotype on Lukas Osaka 300g/m²,  24x32cm

Alla

© Andreas Reh                Alla from Russia, Feb 2012, Cyanotype on Canvas, 38x48cm

The princess with frog

© Andreas Reh     Cyanotype on Aquarell Paper Canson Montval, 24x32cm, darkened with tannic acid <1min

The influence of water hardness

Every time I´d dryed perfect exposed wet fabric-cyanotypes in the past, I wondered about the fact, that they bleached out very strongly with yellow stained highlights. Sometimes this goes with the picture but often it was to strongly fade out. On paper this was only minimal detectable and therefore never a problem.

You must know, our tap water is very hard, >180 ppm, so I went into preamble, that the large amount of remain water in the fabric leads into a chalk enrichment during the drying process. And we know all, alkalinity is the cyanotypes death.

Confused by those poor results on fabric I have done a comparative test under identical conditions last week. The first cyanotype was washed out 2 times á 5 minutes in tap water and third wash á 5 min was done in destilled water, the second cyantype was washed out 3 times á 5 minutes in tap water before dryed. After the drying process the result was very surprising for me!

See yourself, the left cyanotype washed with destilled water, the right cyanotype with tap water, Beside that, on this picture the fade out effect fits well, the result isn´t so bad.

© Andreas Reh     Cyanotype on Canvas, 42x48cm, the left cyano washed in destilled water, the right cyanotype in tap water. 

Cyanotype - Confident

© Andreas Reh                Cyanotype on Canvas, 38x48cm