I got two new colorants (the term I've decided to use for solutions used to make anthotypes) recently from a natural dye website: sandalwood and madder root.
Sandalwood came as a thick, heavy powder with the same consistency as turmeric, which makes me hopeful. I mixed it with a bit of denatured alcohol and got the same strong, vibrant color as turmeric. Sandalwood is a pure, strong orange. I have to do more research on it to find out, but additional chemicals might be able to render yellow-orange and red-orange shades.
Madder root is, well, root. It's twigs that you have to soak overnight and grind into a pulpy mass of wood chips, which you then boil. The soup that resulted is a brilliant, bloody red and looked really, really great! Unfortunately, I already tried brushing the madder dye onto paper and got almost no results. I soaked the paper in the madder and got a pale red.. not at all the vermillion that Madder is apparently capable of according to my research.
I've got some raw silk soaking in the madder and I hope it will take better than paper did. I'll find out tomorrow when I check the dye bath. If that doesn't work, I've got some hope for evaporating off the water and collecting the powdery residue that precipitates to the bottom whenever I let the dye sit. I think THAT might have the alizarin pigment that madder carries. Once I manage to separate the dusty stuff from the liquid, I'll try an alcohol mix with the dust and see what I get.
The Madder-soaked paper will have to wait till tomorrow, but the sandalwood paper is already exposing. A three-day test exposure will be ready tomorrow!
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