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

Toning cyanotypes with tannic acid

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)

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.)