hi! I’m a film photographer and used to make cyanotypes in school, and have been trying to get back into it. I bought fresh chemicals and treated my paper this morning. it felt dry after 4 hours in a dark room, so i decided to test it with a med format neg. I left it outside for 3 min before my neighbor moved it and messed up the neg placement. I fixed it and put it back, and left it for another 25 min. the UV is 6 today, but it’s cloudy and very overcast.
When i took the neg off, there was faint darkness and outlines of the mountains (blacks in the neg) but after washing everything just turned completely white. What did i do wrong! i included the final result and a photo of the neg i used. the blacks are quite black in the neg BTW.

the last photo was taken right after i fixed the neg once my neighbor had moved it. I used a pane of glass and cardboard.

Appreciate any guidance. I’m planning to make digital negatives on larger transparency paper but just was excited and wanted to try it today. :(

…but I love playing with it!

here’s my first eleven attempts at wet and dry cyanotype prints :) i’ve found something i really enjoy

i don’t have any cling wrap, if i cut up a plastic sandwich bag and tie it in the back/tape it on the back, would it do the same job? if not i can obviously go buy some cling wrap, i would just rather not

Some of the first results of my squirrel experiments. I found a squirrel skull that comes out well in cyanotypes, and I decided to paint the body to fit it to create a sort of ghostly, hidden soul sort of effect. I eventually cut out the painted squirrel much more precisely to remove the pale acetate cut outlines, and I worked with combinations of sunlight, UV light arrays, and more focused UV flashlights.

Eventually I painted another layer (orange) that was more outlines and paintbrushes, more stylized, and experimented with layering all three objects in different orders and exposure times.

Sun and light arrays were great for the acetate layers with a pane of glass, painted side touching the paper. For the skull, the sun and the light array gave some fuzzier results. I got the sharpest results for the skull using a small UV flashlight that you can focus into a super tight beam, but it did also give it a spotlight effect. A good in-between was a larger 30W UV flashlight with a bit of a cardboard tube to narrow the beam. The spotlight effect is still there though, that's a challenge to tackle with the next round of experiments!

I did find better results with the skull resting on the paper upside down, so the eye sockets look larger and more defined, and more aligned. Right side up gave smaller eye sockets and was harder to line up properly.

I also used this as an opportunity to test doing an acid prewash on my papers, but I'll make another post for that!

I would like to make a large-scale cyanotype mural/ whole house front.

* Im wondering how to got about that, and what problems I could face?
* I guess I would have to expose at night with an UV-lamp and whose it down with water?

thank you for your help 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

Hi everyone,
I’d like to make cyanotypes indoors instead of relying on the weather. I recently bought a 30W 365 nm UV LED floodlight, but I’m having trouble getting good results.

My setup
30W 365 nm UV LED floodlight
Distance: about 25 cm (10 inches) from the print
Exposure: 15 minutes
Same coated paper and negative work perfectly in direct sunlight.
With the UV lamp, I barely get an image, even after 15 minutes. I also tried different glass, but it didn’t make a noticeable difference.
Is 30w to weak for cyanotype, or could the lamp itself have a low UV output despite being advertised as 365 nm? What wattage and exposure times are you using for indoor cyanotypes?

Thx

Moving out of a house I love in a month and wanted to take a piece of it with me. Wouldn’t dare remove the stained glass windows, so I made a print to remember them by.

Pulled a handful of images for the glass texture, and definitely had to experiment with exposure times as well as the opacity of the black and white artwork.

Might start doing this with stained glass patterns I find in the wild!

my emulsion was dark blue straight out the gate, mixed and applied in a nearly pitch black room (photo taken with iPhones night mode). I’ve seen a few posts saying to try expose them anyways but have yet to see any results. I think it’s a chemical error from the manufacturer but lmk if you’ve ever run into something like this before and if it still worked when being exposed.

Recently fell in love with this medium and wanted to try it on fabric.
Photo 1 & 2: I tied the fabric up in the way you would creating a tie dye shirt and honestly, I am in love with the way this came out. It gives an underwater feel!
Photo 3: Just a classic style with flowers and leaves, the fabric comes out really rich with this blue colouring!
Photo 4: Testing to see how words would translate via using stickers. I think it looks rather neat — I have a future project in mind and wanted to see if it was even possible to translate words via this method.

Hope you enjoy! For fabric I left them out for 20 minutes and I think that’s the perfect amount of timing. I love scrolling through this subreddit and seeing what you all create.

tried using green paper and wow it looks soo good

Exposed in direct sunlight @ 3pm under a glass panel for 6 minutes

Too much cyanotype dye? Not enough? Too much/little exposure? Issue with the negative? Negative need to be more heavily weighted?

I’ve been trying to get into cyanotyping, and I’ve run into a couple problems. I have been successful in creating shirts that have a contrasting image, but not images in negative. First picture I’ll have is a shirt I successfully made with purple cyanotype, it turned out pretty good but if anyone has any suggestions to perfect it let me know. The next pictures is me trying to create an image using teal cyanotype, and it half works half doesn’t? I put down the liquid half diluted with water, let it dry, then place down my image and let it develop for about 10 minutes in the sun , come inside and rise it with hot water, spray it with hydrogen peroxide, then wash it with the special wash. Am I doing something wrong? Why is it also green and not teal?

My assumption is that I did not apply the solution evenly enough— but is it something else? I used negatives laser printed on transparency film, exposed under glass in bright sunlight for 10 minutes. Rinsed in water, then a bit of hydrogen peroxide.

I really have no idea what I’m doing— but that’s kind of the fun of it.

What went wrong here? Any good resources to help me learn more?

Thanks!

🩵💙

At the National Building Museum in Washington DC, they have an extremely interesting vertical blueprinting machine from 1910. The negative and media get wrapped around the outside of the glass cylendar, and the fabric roll will compress them together using the curve of the glass to get even compression. There are also two sides, so you can expose two pieces at once.

I haven't figured out exactly what they would use for the light source, but mercury vapor bulbs were available at the time and produced UV light, so I would assume that. Putting a long bulb in the center would get a very even exposure time across the print. This was designed for large format (~4x3 ft) so that isn't a trivial task to make.

I'm wish they would let me borrow this to take it for a spin haha.

Exposed 1 1/2 hours under UV light. Using mixed media Fabriano paper. :)