Rainbow Reverie: Green

Anthotypes are a pretty green process; they don't use any caustic chemicals and no heavy metals. In most cases (and all cases for me, personally) they don't even use any artificial dyes. Natural plant products and alcohol are all that go into making the 'chemistry' used for the process. The exposure is sunlight and there's no development process or fixing at all.

That's all well and good, but today we're talking about a different kind of green. At I thought that green pigments for anthotypes would be really easy to come by; plants are green, right? Well, I tried just throwing green leaves, cut grass and shrubbery into the blender and making prints with the resulting muck. Nothing. There just wasn't enough pigment in most leafy bits to generate a lasting dye. Considering how hard it is to remove grass stains from clothing, I think there might still be potential there and the grass I was using was just too dry and dead. Very real possibility considering the lawns around here.

So, there was despair. Later, I was able to track down some potential subjects and tried them out. I've actually had a lot more success than expected! So, here are the green dyes that I've tested and the results.

Swiss Chard Anthotype

Swiss Chard: I found some folks working with this dye on Flickr and they'd gotten pretty good results, so I gave it a try myself. Boiling the chard leaves and using the water left over will give you a stain, but it's weak and pale, almost brown instead of green. Once again, I don't recommend boiling your anthotype dyes. When I stripped the leaves off the chard and simply tossed them in the blender with water (first) or alcohol (second test), the results were much stronger. Chard gives you fairly yellow greens, but they're bright and exposure times are nice and short. After 3 days you can expect the field of your anthotype to have faded to a tan and the image to remain a bright green.

Spinach: Before I came across chard, I tried spinach. I will be trying it again in the future, but the plant is closely related to chard and I don't expect the results to differ very much. My original results from spinach produced a stain so faint it was almost invisible before exposure and after it was exposed the result needed extensive post-processing to even be seen.

Spirulina: Fairly cheap to purchase, you can get spirulina at your local health store because it's some trendy new part of a healthy diet. Lots of plant-protein or something. For our purposes it's a dark green powder that readily dissolves in alcohol and will give you a smooth, bright green that hasn't got much yellow or blue to taint it. It's also pretty fast; exposures will vary but should be less than 4 days.

Red Cabbage: The color of the liquids here is pretty deceptive, and red cabbage is a dye that needs some fiddling to produce the colors you want. Baking soda (alkali) will alter the color of the liquid and the stain. I haven't tried acid, but that's on my to-do list. The raw liquid obtained from pureeing the cabbage leaves is bright violet, but dries down to a nice summer-sky blue. To get a green, you'll add the baking soda to your filtered liquid, which will turn bright blue. The blue liquid will produce a nice sea-green stain. If you use alcohol to dilute your cabbage, the color that results will be bluer. Using water gives you a more green cast. This gets a little complicated, so there's a chart!
Exposure times for red cabbage, no matter the color, are on the heavy end of the scale, at least a full week. This may be due to working in the autumn instead of the summer. The brighter greens may require a bit of tweaking in Photoshop to give the best detail; there are similar issues to turmeric and sandalwood with the intensity and brightness of the color hiding some detail. The boiled dyes also did not perform nearly as well as the alcohol-based dyes.

Blackberry Anthotype

Blackberry: Under normal circumstances, blackberry dye is purple. However, if you dilute the dye at a 2:1 ratio with alcohol, the stain is pale green and provides fantastic detail in as little as a single day of exposure.

Oak Leaves: Terrible idea. Ran them through the blender with alcohol, didn't stain at all.

Grass: Also a terrible idea. Considering how common grass stains are on clothing, though, I think the problem might have been that the grass I was using was just dry and sickly. I might have to talk to some landscaping people at a park or golf course and see if I can get some clippings.