Alternative Photography: Cyanotype Solar Print

Original available cms x cms Hemp Paper

My maiden voyage into the wonderful world of alternative photography, cyanotype, surprinting.

This one from one of *my photos of a first Grevillia Bloom, photographed in 2022.

The original was created on @hahnemühle Hemp paper. Prints on the Smooth Cotton Rag will replicate beautifully. Created with my negative, printed by nature in the sunshine on my patch in Nimbin 2023. Mother Nature opened and closed the ️curtains, to make it just that much more fun. To say I enjoy the creative process and look of this age old craft would be an understatement. I adore the Prussian blues.

A safe and sustainable art form I’m able to achieve in my superbly small space, here on a patch of paradise I call home. Where I play, paint & create for your and my joy. I am so excited using also my Hemp cloth, as a raw and beautifully natural partner to this technique.

These will go up on the website in *time, along with my botanicals and naturally modified cyanotypes. Using foraged botanicals from my patch and the addition of tannins and other elements such as salt and paprika for some magically expressive prints.

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Grateful to English botanical artist, collector and photographer Anna Atkins, who was the first person to illustrate a botanical book, with photographic images of botanical’s she wanted to document. Myself as a lover of nature enjoy foraging plants to do as Anna has done and now play and elaborate with endless amounts creative expression possible and no two prints ever being created the same.

*Would you like to commission a cyanotype? If you have a HIGHLY CONTRASTING favourite photo you own, we can chat.

#cyanotype #botanicalart #northernriversartist #sunprint #comtemporaryart #prussianblue #lizwilsonartwork #blueprint #artistsoninstagram #hemp #solarprint #australianartist

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND – Ref Getty
The cyanotype process (a print example is shown in fig. 1) was invented by the astronomer
and chemist John Frederick William Herschel (British, 1792–1871) and featured in his paper
“On the Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Vegetable Colours and on Some New
Photographic Processes,” which was presented to the Royal Society of London on June 16, 1842.
The name cyanotype was derived from the Greek name cyan, meaning “dark-blue impression.”
Color changes of solution of iron salts were noticed first by Count Bestuscheff in 1725 and more
precisely described in 1831 by Johann Wolfgang Doebereiner (1780–1849). The inorganic pigment
Prussian blue (hydrated iron hexacyano ferrate complex), which is the image-forming material
of cyanotypes, was prepared first by Heinrich Diesbach in Berlin between 1704 and 1710 and was used after about 1730 as a pigment in oil paintings and watercolors. Herschel experimented
with the cyanotype process in the 1840s and inspired Anna Atkins, daughter of his friend Dr.
John Children, to illustrate her botanical studies with cyanotype photograms. The three volumes
of her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–53) represent the earliest
examples of books illustrated with photogenically produced images.
The cyanotype process was seldom used until the 1880s, when it became a cheap proofing process
for collodion, dry gelatin plates, and gelatin roll film before the final printing, which used more
expensive silver- or platinum-based photographic processes. From the 1870s until about the
1950s, when it was replaced by diazo-based reprographic processes, the cyanotype process and
its variants were the primary processes used by engineers and architects to copy plans.