Anthotypical Production

I can't decide if the prints I'm making these days are "anthotypes" at all. Certainly, they use the same process of sun-bleaching to produce a negative image via contact printing. However, an "anthotype" by definition should use flowers. Anthos means flower. Maybe a more accurate term would be Floratype or would that be Florotype? My Latin is a bit fuzzy.

I've gotten MUCH better results from spices than from flowers. Fruits and flowers I can sorta see as being under "anthotype" but it's hard for me to say a print made with a coffee sensitizer is an "anthotype." Coffee isn't a flower.

That aside, I've been having a LOT of fun this week and last working on my anthotypes (for the moment, I'll go with the established term). Some really fun results and one mind-blowing WTF moment where I still haven't figured out what happened.

Flickr, of course, has the latest results of my experimentation. See it over here?

Yeah, you see it. Ain't it cool?

Double-exposure is a pretty neat trick, I like the way it worked out. I'm going to be trying that one again, this time with a mixed tumeric-wine sensitizer.

Digital manipulation of the original anthotype images just blew me away. When I scanned the first batch, all I wanted to do was boost the colors a bit, maybe clean up some stubborn spots of plant-matter adhered to the image. This second round? Adjusting the curves of the images opened up whole new levels of detail that were recorded, but not visible. Seriously, check out the Cactus image.

The biggest surprise came from the Red Wine print I made with fresh pansies. At first, I thought it was a failure. Hardly any bleaching had occurred after 6 days of good, strong sunlight. I could barely tell where the pansies had been, even when I was trying to pry them off the paper. On a whim, and a suggestion from Tiffany, I decided to wash the print to see if anything happened. No, it didn't. But then, for some reason, I decided to scrub the print with soapy water and a sponge. The red wine pigment started to come off very easily and underneath, there was a BLEACHED OUT IMAGE OF THE FLOWERS! The paper retained a good amount of red-brown coloration, EXCEPT where the fresh flowers had been pressed! Somehow, the flowers bleached away everything UNDER them, but it wasn't revealed until I washed away the pigment on the surface of the paper!

NO idea how it happened but... wow! It was amazing to watch. The print is pretty nice, too, but the REAL triumph of that print was just seeing it appear out of ruin and loss!