Crazy Cool Colors

When I first started researching anthotypes and the possible dyes used to make them, I immediately found that there are very few ways to create natural, plant-based dyes that fall into the cooler part of the color spectrum. Many plants create yellows, oranges, red-pinks, purples and browns. There are very few natural plant-based dyes that create blues or greens.

At first I thought, well that's stupid, most plants are green, why can't I just grind up their leaves? Well, most plants that I tired simply didn't produce much of a color, even ground up and reduced to a paste. While searching around Flickr, and then again reading Malin Fabbri's new book on Anthotypes, I learned that chard seems to give a good, strong green. Researching other natural dyes, I came across some ideas for using red cabbage to produce a blue and learned that an algae called spirulina is used to tint soaps and candles green.

So, I went to the local health store to buy the spirulina (it's also a herbal diet supplement) and hit the local grocery store to get the chard and the red cabbage.

Chard was a bit tricky to work with. The instructions I had run across suggested boiling it to produce a stronger color. This was in direct contrast to my earlier observations that boiling dyes seems to break down the pigment and give a weaker color. My experiments with chard basically confirmed my earlier theory: the boiled chard solution was pale and brownish. I do not anticipate strong results.

I tried putting shredded chard leaves into the blender mixed with water and got a reasonably strong solution, strained through cheesecloth to remove the plant matter. My results were far stronger, again as noted in earlier experiments, when iso-alcohol was used instead of water. Chard seems to produce a very nice, soft green that fades to brown when exposed to light. That gives a good contrast between the image and the field.

Spirulina hasn't been exposure-tested yet, but I've mixed up a solution of the algae (it's a dark green powder) and iso-alcohol that gave a good, true green. It's a bit bluer than the chard solution and a tiny bit darker. Expecting good things from the mixture.

The red cabbage was a very surprising idea. I actually found it on a blog about all-nature food coloring alternatives. The original recipe, once again, called for boiling. Already suspicious, I tried both boiling the leaves and blending them into paste. By itself, the red cabbage renders an intensely violet dye, but when applied to paper it dries from violet to a pure sky blue, a truly gorgeous color. The boiled dye produced virtually no results, but the blended (diluted with alcohol) mixture is great.

The food blog entry was about creating blue dye from red cabbage, and in a liquid form the red cabbage is violet. So the food blogger noted that adding alkalinity to the cabbage dye (baking soda) would convert the violet liquid into a deep blue solution. It does! It's amazing! Hold up, though. Just as the violet liquid dries into a sky blue, the navy liquid from the baking soda-cabbage mixture dries a different color: teal. It's an absolutely amazing blue-green and I can't wait to see what it looks like after exposure!

I am SO excited to get these mixtures into frames, but it will have to wait until after the weekend. I will be scanning the test sheets before exposure to document the colors. I'm working on a more orderly approach, with double the records, since I'm in the process of compiling together what might become a book on anthotypes.