Hi everyone, welcome to season two of Curious By Nature.
My name is Marjorie and today we're going to be making sun prints with our great friend, artist Katherine Lampert.
Let's get started.
I'm Katherine Lampert and today we're going to be doing a painterly sun printing project.
So I'm going to start with sun print paper.
It comes in a light-fast envelope,
and you need to make sure that the paper that you're not using stays inside there
so that it doesn't get exposed to the sun before we want it to.
It's got this blue color.
And you're also going to need a piece of cardboard,
which I just grabbed off the back of an old sketchbook that I didn't need anymore,
and a piece of plexiglass.
You could also use a plastic wrap, but I just happened to have this laying around, so I thought it was perfect.
The first thing that I'm going to do, is put my cardboard down first,
and then I'm going to take my blue sun print paper and put it down on top of the cardboard, face up.
Then I am going to take some objects that I found from my natural environment.
I went on a nature walk and discovered all kinds of really beautiful, different types of leaves
a lot of these were from the Museum grounds late summer.
We still have some pretty flowers, as well as some fall leaves, so that's kind of a nice mix.
Some interesting grasses.
Once you have an arrangement that you're satisfied with,
you will take your piece of plexiglass, or you can use saran wrap,
and place it down on top of your arrangement, and that will just sort of help
keep everything from blowing away and flatten everything a little bit,
so that you get a really nice silhouette from all of your natural objects.
You want to time your print so that it's in the sun for four to six minutes,
and I'm going to use this hourglass timer,
kind of a cool old part of an ancient Scrabble set, I think, that I found,
but you can use your phone or whatever you want to use to time four to six minutes.
So this is the painterly part, it's sort of an optional special effect.
I have a bucket that I'm gonna fill with just a little bit of water and some dish soap
and I'm just going to use my hand to agitate the water
and get some bubbles on there, so you have some foam.
And I'm going to scoop the foam and put it right on top of my plexiglass.
These bubbles are just going to create kind of an interesting effect,
sort of a painterly print, and we will move this into the direct sunlight to be exposed.
Okay, so you're gonna take your plexiglass off of your arrangement and then remove your nature objects.
And you want to quickly submerge your project in the tub of water
and you'll leave it in the water for about a minute as your picture develops.
After a minute or so in the water, I'm going to take my sun print out
and hang it on a clothesline or flat on a table to dry.
Hanging this here on the clothesline to dry and continue to develop,
and if you watch it, it will start to get darker and eventually be as dark as these other prints on the line.
So this is kind of the very easy, you don't have to buy anything,
use what you have laying around the house version of this project.
You can actually do a sun print on regular, plain old construction paper.
Any color is going to be fine.
I tried one on red, one on blue, and I really liked how they came out.
So, again, you're going to go for a nature walk and pick out as many interesting shapes as you can find.
Things that kind of can be flattened so that they have a nice silhouette shape work really well.
Maybe you don't have any plexiglass laying around,
so you can use some saran wrap if you want to.
You really don't even need it, but I'm going to use some just because I find it's easier
to kind of have everything held down under a clear surface.
You're going to use rocks to hold down the edges of your saran wrap,
keeping in mind that anything that you put on the paper is going to print.
So, if you put the stone on the print, that's also going to be a shape.
And you can also use some smaller stones or pebbles
to weigh down some of the smaller shapes, if you want to.
It depends how windy your day is, I guess.
I'm going to leave this in the sun for two to three hours, or more.
Really, the longer you leave it in direct sunlight, the more contrasted your print is going to be.
And it doesn't have to be outside.
You can leave it on a window ledge.
Anywhere where it's going to get direct sunlight is going to be great.
It's so fun, I feel like it's such a fun surprise
to see your print underneath all of those cool shapes that you found.
And that is our construction paper version of sun printing today.
That's our show for today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I hope you enjoyed making sun prints.
Be sure to leave any questions in the comments below,
and send us your design on social media.
Don't forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode!
We'll see you back here next time on Curious By Nature.