Blogging for Freya: The Importance of Lite

Silver Geometry #1, kosher salt

Silver Geometry #1 (reprint), 'lite' salt.

Hello, Spiders! It's been a while, and I'm sorry. I've been having a rough spot. Hopefully things are looking better! I'm certainly being more productive!

Lately, I've been back at work on the Silver Geometry Project, because there's a few shows I want to submit pieces of it to. I think they work better as 'stand alone' pieces than my thesis work does. The thesis work needs the artist statement, the titles, and some context to really be understood fully. I think that's a weakness of the thesis, and I'm working on it as I research ideas for new pieces. Silver Geometry, though, has really strong images even if the conceptual framework is looser and less rigorous. So they're what I'm working on right now, and trying to push to shows.

While I have been making new designs, I also started to re-visit some of the designs where I like the drawing, but feel that the prints didn't work out. It's been interesting, since there are a lot of little elements that are outside of my control in the process. I've also been experimenting with altering how fast I work.

Silver Geometry #13, with most of the value variation lost

This week, I tried to create more variety of value by moving the photogram material around pretty rapidly. It worked out well, but the resulting values were so delicate (created after only minutes of sunlight) that all it took was a little hesitation and distraction for a blast of bright, direct light to nearly obliterate the delicate shading. So, while I like the idea of more controlled value variation, I probably need to do that on one print at a time, instead of shuffling my attention between several prints at once. I may also need to do that on overcast days, or even inside through a window. Direct sunlight just moves the reactions too fast.

In these recent prints, I've also been manipulating the chemistry more directly. I created some lighter blue colors by diluting the cyanotype chemistry with water. I forced the silver nitrate to turn violet and red instead of brown and black by using "lite" salt instead of regular salt when preparing the paper. Since "lite" salt is a mixture of 50% potassium chloride and 50% sodium chloride, it causes a dramatically different coloration.

Up next is really small prints made from scraps of the larger sheets of Rives BFK that I'm using for the 5x5s. These are about 2.5 inches square, so the designs have to be a lot simpler. I think that'll be a fun challenge. I'm also considering some 5x5s where the chemigram component is extremely simple, and all the visual interest comes from the value added in the photogram stage. It's been a super busy week, but I'm hoping to get a good bit done this weekend and next week!

Check back in soon, Spiders!!

Blogging for Thor: The Shape of Things to Come

Silver Geometry Print #2: Silver Nitrate and Cyanotype

Hello, my lovely Spiders! I'm doing very well; I hope you are, too? Great.

Last week, I talked about beginning a new project. For the moment, I'm calling it "Silver Geometry" but that's likely to change since I've already made at least one image without any silver in it at all.

Step-by-step for
Silver Geometry #1

The biggest challenge so far is the fixed 2 day exposure time. With such a long exposure, the d-max of some chemicals is reached too quickly. If I want to preserve the colors created various levels of exposure, I need to work more quickly and then cover the area with an opaque block.

My first experiment using cyanotype and potassium dichromate provided a sad example of this kind of d-max failure. I was attempting to add rectangular areas of reduced exposure to the circle-based chemigram, but even leaving the opaque rectangles in place for 6-8 hours at a time, the exposure equalized so rapidly that no trace remains in the final image. There should have been four lighter areas intruding into the circular pattern. They're gone.

If I want to continue using faster-reacting chemicals like cyanotype and dichromate, it appears I'll have to create a color with varied exposure, get it to whatever tonality I want, then "seal" it by placing the opaque shape back over that area for the rest of the exposure.

There is good news, though! The first image worked out wonderfully and the
third image came out nicely, too. The third image hasn't got very strong shadows from the paper and tinfoil triangles I used, but it was enough to make faint impressions in the silver rectangle on the right, and to create a gradient in the uppermost cyanotype stripe.

The second two prints also showed the rather lovely potential from painting the chemicals next to each other, and allowing them to overlap and mix. I'm in love with what's happening on the third image where the silver nitrate and cyanotype solutions mixed together.

In the future, I'm going to be incorporating kallitype chemistry, possibly some toners, and experimenting with painting different salts onto the page to alter the color of the silver nitrate stains. This project is looking so fun, Spiders!

I'll be using Instagram to document the progress and layout of each print as I move through the stages of designing the geometric drawing, painting the chemistry onto the paper, setting up the photogram objects and then moving them around during the exposure. So if you want to follow me for updates, that'd be pretty awesome. I love seeing Spiders on social media!

Blogging for Thor: Developing Developments

Day 7 of Exposure, Unsalted Silver Nitrate Print

I've currently put my "un-salt" prints on hold for a bit, but I'm sure that I'll be back to them soon. Part of that was finding out that the "cupric chloride" I got from Bostick & Sullivan was actually cuprous chloride. That little difference means quite a lot, since cuprous chloride is a fair bit more dangerous to work with than cupric chloride. It's also not water-soluble at all, so even if I wanted to risk it, I couldn't make a solution out of it. So, that sucked. I do still have several more chemicals, including cesium chloride, that I'm looking forward to testing out. For right now, though, I'm focusing on my actual prints instead of pure research.

What I've been doing lately is making scans of the prints as they develop. This means not only do I get to track the degredation of the print once it's made, I get to see what's happening as the exposure goes on. Since my exposures are upwards of two days, this works pretty well. I'm expecting this will go faster once there starts being brighter, hotter days again.

Overall, I'm enjoying getting a glimpse at the work from the other side. Normally I only get to see if out of the frame when it's finished exposing. I might lose some detail and registration this way (since I have to take the print out of the frame, remove the photogram object, then reassemble the thing after scanning) but I'm getting a lot more information. The process of development is really more fascinating than the process of print decay.

Blogging for Odin: Orderly Presentation

Well, Spiders, I'm a bit late with today's blog. Six days late, actually. Unfortunately the only excuse I have is that I simply didn't get around to editing all these images and patching them together into a cohesive scan. The beginning of the semester has been a little stressful, and I've been trying to keep it all together. But, I do hope to have an entry for tomorrow, too!

After my experiments with photograms, I decided I needed something more controlled to really do a proper test of these different halide solutions. So, I created a little digital "test sheet"that has a smooth white-to-black gradient, a 15% medium grey bar, and a six-step zone chart that has 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% and 0% black. Using this test sheet, I can tell if one compound has more contrast, less contrast, exposes faster or slower, and get a much wider range of tonality than by using photograms. I'm also controlling the process further by printing in one of the university's UV exposure boxes, instead of in sunlight.

So far, my results aren't mind-blowing or anything.

The potassium iodide (KI) is really.. ugly. I mean, there's just not anything redeeming about it, especially not once it's been fixed. Maybe it's nice in the "latent" form, just after exposure, but even just a salt water wash makes it muddy and unpleasant. Fixing it just turns it to a dull, rather hideous brown.

Ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) is extremely similar to sodium chloride (NaCl). The only difference I can see, and it's quite subtle, is that the ammonium chloride seems to be a little bit warmer. There are two tests for ammonium chloride because the first test had some pretty hideous staining. The second test, though, was slightly compromised because I waited a full day between exposing it and fixing it. This almost certainly caused some fogging in the paper before the fixing.

Bromo-Iodizer has the most interesting results, providing warm yellow highlights and soft brown shadows. I can certainly see some uses for this coloration, but I'm personally not a huge fan. I do like the long-exposure greens that it produces, but I'm not sure if I like it enough to continue working with the Bromo-Iodizer. It's quite nasty stuff, and I may be able to get similar results by simply using potassium bromide and potassium iodide together, without the presence of alcohol or cadmium.

Assuming that I've recovered from my current head-cold by tomorrow, I'll be giving a test to potassium chloride and potassium bromide, both of which arrived recently. I was able to mix up a 3% solution of both, coat and dry some test sheets, but didn't have time to apply the silver nitrate or do a test exposure. So those salted papers are waiting for me in the lab!

Toss some positive vibes my way, Spiders. I could use 'em for this little plague.

Blogging for Sól: Back to the Books

Red Nightshade on Collodio POP

Hello, Spiders. It's been a long time. 80 days, actually. I've missed 11 weeks of updates, mostly due to the massive life transition of going from adjunct professor in Charlotte, North Carolina to being a grad student in Boston, Massachusetts. It hasn't been easy, and there are still minor details with paperwork to work out.

Being back in school as a student has been challenging, but it's also really helpful. I needed to start thinking about how to present my work and how to apply it in a real-world setting. After just a few weeks here, I have an idea for a show I want to put on. I just have to figure out where and how.

Unfortunately for today's update, I don't have any samples of the new show to share. How the show works physically is going to inform a lot about how I put the pieces together. I'm hoping to hang anthotypes in the windows of an atrium in such a way that the prints themselves face outward, visible from the street, but inside the back of each piece has details about the plant and the process and the expected result.

So, instead, I have a few samples of lumens that I've been making since I got here. This image is the first print I've made with the first new plant that I found here in New England. There's red nightshade growing all several fences and hedges on the way from my apartment to the bus stop. So I've been gathering it and making prints. I even gathered a lot of the berries and extracted dye from them. I'll post that information later, though.

It's good to be back, Spiders. Have a good night!

Blogging for Thor: Salted Sadness

Sweaty and squinting was the whole day.

Hello, Spiders. I've been feeling unwell and generally pre-occupied either with grad school, moving, loans or medical issues. Thus, two missed weeks of blogs.

Despite that, I have been making (or trying to make) art! After the salt prints at my workshop failed, I decided to figure out why. Well, I determined easily enough that it was the paper. So I switched to a different brand (Arches Aquarelle Cold-Press Blocks) and the coating went well. The exposures went well. I got great images with full detail and tonal range... until I fixed them. As soon as I fix any of these salt prints I've been making, they darken dramatically. All the whites turn beige at best and dull brown at worst. Some of the images disappear entirely. They're fine before the fix, and ruined afterwards. I really can't pin down what's going on. So, figuring out the salt printing issues is one artistic challenge on my plate.

In other news, I attended my first local artist market as a vendor. It was hot, sticky and not very profitable. I only sold $31 worth of prints (three total pieces) and all to people I knew. So I wasn't that excited. But, one of those people was a friend I'd known years ago while taking typography classes at the local community college. Now she's working at a handmade boutique in the Charlotte arts district. That's great, and she seems to really love her work. She also loves my work, and bought two of my pieces. She'd reached out to contact me via the Facebook advertising for the art show even before she realized who I was. So this coming week I'll be meeting with her and the owner of the boutique to see if they'd like to sell my work. Cyanotype totes, parchment prints and the cyanotype jewelry, mostly. Maybe some of my textiles.

Even if the show didn't work out, I'm hoping this new opportunity will! I'll keep you posted on the shop and the salt, Spiders!

Blogging for Freya: Friday Failures

Well my dear Spiders, I don't have a post tonight. I have some things to post about, but I am very tired. I'm going to bed, like a responsible adult who has appointments and errands to get done tomorrow. Then, like an irresponsible adult, I'm going to a concert tomorrow night. So there will almost certainly not be a blog entry on Saturday. It'll be Sunday before I get anything of substance up. Hey, at least I have a timeline for my failures, right?

So look forward to an update Sunday regarding the new shipment of Osage Orange wood that arrived on Wednesday. I have some plans for it, and some of the pieces are just so tiny and adorable. With the weather turning nice, I can do a lot more printing because 1) there's sunlight, and 2) my studio isn't freezing anymore. My students have next week off for Spring Break, so I'm hoping to get a bunch of printing done. It oughta be super fun, and a big push towards finishing up my grant project.

Cheers, Spiders!

Blogging for Thor: The Cloud is Our Friend

Hello Spiders. Today's update is small, but at least it'll be on time. I received a comment from one of you, an actual human Spider. At least, he sounded human. He brought up something that I've been noticing myself: some of the pictures on older posts have been disappearing. These are photos that I've linked to via Instagram, Flickr, or Facebook, so I assume it's those services (or maybe me) fiddling around with back-end stuff and messing up the links.

Well, that's kinda lame. If a new Spider wants to crawl around in the blog, they should be able to see the lovely photos and examples. So I've gone through and repaired all the broken links, uploading the troubled photos directly to the blog. I'll be doing this from now on, and checking regularly to see if there are any further broken links. If you see one, just leave a comment! I do love comments!

I actually have a real update for this week, but I want to give it another day or two. It's regarding some of the anthotypes I started exposure on waaaay back at the beginning of December. Winter isn't a good time to do anthotypes, but I figured I'd give it a whirl. Applying to grad schools and going over all my application packets always makes me incredibly twitchy, but it reminds me of the other two experiments that I'm working on. I generally only work on one at a time, so sometimes I forget. Cyanotypes have been eating my attention for months, but I figure come spring, I'll get back to lumens and anthotypes. Won't that be nice?

Seeya soon, Spiders!