It's Been A Long Time

Test #4, most successful test!

Test #1

But now I'm back! Not from outer space, sadly. Today's topic is cyanovellums. I coated a bunch of different sized pieces a few days ago and have been slowly testing different processes on the resulting prints. Borax bleaching on cyanovellums produces a really interesting result: the blues turn orange.

1. No color shifts, but the bleaching turned the dark blue a mottled cyan-green, with large patched bleached almost fully away. The original image retained its blue color, but was rendered visible where previously it had been almost hidden.
2. The 'field' of the image turned a brilliant orange, and the image itself bleached fully out, leaving semi-translucent vellum without any coloration at all.
3. The 'field' turned orange as with the previous test, but the image itself retained a blue-gray coloration, a very nice contrast.
4. Results identical to #3

I haven't figured out what causes the difference between 1, 2 and 3/4. Oddly, 3 and 4 were bleached the longest, each one soaking for at least 8 hours. I would have expected them to leave no trace of blue at all, but they were the only ones to hold the blue color. Very odd.

Test #3

With the result for Test #1 being not very pretty, I decided to use it as a subject in my next test: two-step toning of cyanovellums. It was already bleached, so that was the easy part. I brewed up a solution of SuperTea! and proceeded from there.

To make SuperTea! I brewed 8 family-sized bags of Wal-mart brand Black Tea in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes in the microwave and let the tea steep for two hours. I then squeezed the bags to get any extra liquid out of them. The SuperTea had evaporated down to about 16 oz of liquid by this point. 

Test #1: post-borax and post-super tea

I allowed Test #1 to soak in the SuperTea! for about two hours. The vellum stained heavily, but the image redeveloped about as expected. It's now a very dark blue-black, with the image a more mild tan. No reddish color shift as experienced with cyanotypes that have this process applied when printed on paper.

I've got lots more work ahead with my cyanovellums, but at the moment most of my frames are taken up with six new Anthotypes that'll be cooking for the next week! So excited to see the results!