I'm going to show you how to make cyanotype prints and this is the first of two videos
this one is aimed at younger people or anybody that doesn't want to handle chemicals
as we're going to use pre-prepared paper.
Making cyanotypes at home is really easy, you don't need a specialist dark room.
The only piece of specialist kit you need is the pre-prepared paper.
So I've got a particular brand here but you don't need to choose that
and this comes in different sizes so you can choose the one that fits your budget
and like I say you can choose any of the brands as long as it's pre-prepared cyanotype paper.
This just means we avoid having to mix any chemicals up.
The only other kit you're going to need is a piece of cardboard like so
and that's just a piece of packaging that I've repurposed.
You're going to need a piece of acrylic or glass but of course if you use glass you have to be really careful.
If you were to take a piece like this from an old picture frame, lots of them are acrylic anyway and then it will be much safer.
And some giant bulldog clips, or if you don't have those, masking tape or even sellotape is absolutely fine.
That's the kit that we're going to use to make our cyanotypes today.
So a couple of examples that I made yesterday.
Hopefully you can see the one on the left is made out of flowers, grasses,
actually I've even got some pressed flowers that I've put in here,
so just things collected from the garden basically.
The one on the right is kind of human-made things like spanners and nuts and bolt,
there were some pencils in there, a USB charger, just something to act as a contrast really to the natural materials
and that's quite a good starting point when you're experimenting I think.
The paper itself is in a black light-proof bag because we're working with light-sensitive material.
So don't take that out until you absolutely need to do so.
So I'll just put that to one side for a moment.
It's always a good idea to have a little bit of a think about your composition before you actually introduce the paper
so that you can work quickly and you're not exposing the paper before you're ready.
You have a few minutes but it's just better to be ready so you know what you're doing.
I'm ready to do the next stage now which is to take the paper out and expose it to light.
So I'm going to do that as swiftly as I can, so I've got the black bag here which is light proof
and I'm just going to take out one piece of paper. There's 15 pieces in the kit
and you'll see there's a blue side and a white side and it's the blue side that we want.
So here we go! If I just now take this off.
It should be cardboard, light-sensitive paper, the arrangement that you want,
bear in mind I'm doing this quite quickly, you can take a little bit more care because you're probably not filming yourselves while you're doing it!
Pop some of these nuts and bolts on as well just so you can see what is going on here.
So you can see they are quite three-dimensional these things but I'm still able to put the acrylic screen on top like so.
It's all going to get a bit squashed but that's all part of it.
Then I'm just going to use the bulldog clips here to hold it all together
but if you were using masking tape then that's fine too.
I'll get that on there, like so.
OK I'm outside, I've got the cyanotype with me. I'm just going to find a nice spot to put that,
I think it's going to be down here, nice and even, with no shadows.
I'm gonna give this at least five minutes exposure in the light. It's not a particularly bright day, it's a bit overcast.
What we want is for the paper to go a much lighter colour, a white really or near to white,
and then we'll take it inside and wash it but I'm going to give this a few minutes.
OK so I've actually given this seven minutes because it is so overcast. It has gone lighter
and I'm going to take this in and give it a wash now, so you just carry the whole thing in as it is, like so.
Right so I'm actually in the bathroom now so I'm just going to dismantle this.
So just take your clips off and here we go, you can see if I take the acrylic sheet off,
you can see where the objects have been, including the clips, and if you just tip everything off like so,
we're going to put this in the bath and we're going to give this a wash with cold water
just quite carefully as well, so I'm just using a shower head and don't be horrified when you see that
lots of the colour appears to wash out of the print, it will actually come back later on as if as it dries.
We're going to wash this for at least a minute.
I'm back in the workroom now and I just want to show you the wet print and how it's going to look when it's dried.
On the left is the print we've just made, so that's still wet and I've just laid it out on the cardboard flat
so that it can dry like that, it will take a few hours,
but I wanted to show you how it's going to look when it's finished so now if you see the one we made yesterday
side by side with the one we've just made, so the one on the right is the dried one from yesterday
and you can see that over time as it dries that gorgeous rich blue colour will come back into the prints,
so don't feel disillusioned when you wash the print because it looks like all that color's gone, but it comes back as it dries
Finally the last part of the process really. If you're wondering why I've got a little stack of photography books there,
I've actually got the print, now dry, between two pieces of cardboard here and just so that you actually get a nice flat print
all you want to do is leave this overnight with the pile of books stacked up on top.
Nice big heavy ones, or anything that has a bit of even weight really, and then tomorrow you'll have a nice flat cyanotype print.
So that's it, we've made our cyanotype print.
Really simple process, it's really all about creativity and experimentation.
I would suggest that once you've tried that process once you'll feel confident with the technical side of it
and then it's just down to thinking about the content, what you lay on the paper, how you approach it really.
So over to you and good luck!