Cyanotype

Cyanotype of a sunlit forest path.

Lately I have been experimenting with a somewhat magical old photographic technique called cyanotype. Basically one mixes a couple of chemical solutions together, paints the resulting photosensitive mixture on watercolor paper, allows the paper to dry thoroughly, places a negative onto the prepared paper inside a clamped glass frame and allows it to be exposed in the sun for a few minutes. The print is then developed in running water. Voila. You get an interesting all-blue image.

This winter we set up a darkroom off the atelier which allows me to explore some of these simple techniques that seem a natural extension of printmaking to me. If you have an interest in old photographic image-making methods, visit my Pinterest board on the subject, to find some wonderful links. Step-by-step directions for making your own cyanotypes are found there. The community that embraces this craft tends to be very warm, helpful and enthusiastic, so feel free, as I did, to ask questions of the experts. In my experience they always answer.

I started by using photographs for my prints, which lose a lot of detail of course, but can look quite interesting and moody. The technique works perfectly well for drawings and collage also. I haven't tried it, but apparently it even works with leaves and other organic materials.

On Lynda.com you can take a class with Brian Taylor who uses cyanotype as a first step in a process that adds color with another chemical on top of the blue. I have bought the chemical and begun to experiment with this further refinement, but have not so far gotten anything worthy of sharing with you. Brian makes beautiful books out of his images and explains his entire process from start to finish in the on-line course. When I want to treat myself, I buy a month of Lynda.com access and I have found some really wonderful courses there. Brain's was one of my favorites.

Here is a gallery of my first attempts at this interesting technique. My favorite image is the last one. It was actually made with a positive, rather than a negative, so that everything which was meant to be black turned white and everything else turned a shade of blue. This was a collage I put together in Photoshop with a map imposed on top of a photograph of a local church. I was amazed and delighted with the detail of the map lines and type, which are completely legible in the resulting image. In that one I am showing you how the edge of the paper looks with the solution painted on a bit randomly. I like the way the whole thing turned out. I feel inclined to leave the image uncut and incorporate the sloppy edge as part of the final presentation.

Made from a negative. The lake at La Ferté-Bernard

Emily in a Paris café. I like the detail out the window. The mid-tones, however are almost completely lost. Still, I am happy with the mood.

Made from a positive of a pencil drawing.

Photoshop collage

The church at Lavardin with a map superimposed over the image. Here I used a positive, so tones are reversed.

End of summer

The fields around the village are dotted with rolls of hay, evoking the end of a season. These always remind me of Monet and his numerous studies of haystacks at different times of day and in various seasons, colors changing from golden to peach, to purple and blue. It's true that depending upon the moment, the colors and length of shadows change dramatically with the light.

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Last week I gave a three-day art course to Veronique and her son Barnabé, who were in town visiting our neighbors Anne and Christine.

Barnabé is not quite six but already a prolific artist, spending hours a day making pictures and inventing elaborate stories to accompany them. Veronique is an art historian. I felt I had to come up with a project that would be varied enough to be interesting to both of them, engaging the imagination of a child while not being too basic for his talented parent. I chose to have them make a book which would be a keep-sake of their vacation in Montmirail. We made several pages trying out various image-making techniques. This is a leaf print made with watercolor. Directions here.

We also made monotypes, created by painting with water color onto acetate sheets, allowing the paint to dry thoroughly and then running the plates through a press with dampened etching paper.

I discovered a new technique I had never tried before. I loved the results. This is called a gelatin print, which is taken off a bed of hardened gelatin. Directions here. It yields two prints from one ink application and leaf/flower arrangement. A positive/negative, like these,

And a more painterly one. I really enjoyed this technique and I'm anxious to play with it a little more.

We also made cyanotypes and vegetable stamp prints. I thought that Barnabé might have encountered some of these methods at school, but in fact they were all new to him.

He especially enjoyed any of the projects that involved turning the big wheel of the press. We made some beautiful blind emboss prints and these seemed very interesting to Barnabé.

There were various other pages as well. Scraffito, plaster paper drawings and more. We bound them into a book which we covered with cloth after adding a silk screen embellishment on the cover. All this we bound with a Japaneses stab binding.

The hours rolled by very quickly. I think it was fun for them to discover many different ways to put images on paper and then to put them all together in a little souvenir album.

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We are leaving for a couple of weeks vacation in the mountains of Slovenia with our family. I'll be sitting by a river somewhere with sketchbook in hand. In early September I'll post photos here. Meanwhile I leave you with this rather romantic photo of our chambre jaune, taken this morning as the late summer sun streamed in through the windows.

Visit our Bed and Breakfast in France

Autumn Bounty, in the Studio

The weather is extraordinary...the warmest beginning of October here in a hundred years. We're in the eighties, the sky is crystal blue, the windows flung open and the sunny days harmonize with the golden leaves which flutter to the ground all around us as we stroll through the forest.

This is my favorite time of year. I glory in the generosity of nature. I can't walk fast as I must stop every few moments to gather up some forest gifts that lie about me on the pathway.

I particularly like large acorns, with their charming hats. When I poured them out on my table the other day I found two small worms, fat and white wiggling among them.

At David's house in Grand Champ, where we helped him for a morning clearing one of his overgrown fields, I gathered a basket of chestnuts for roasting and some pine cones for decorating.

He had numerous apple trees and in a matter of moments we had several large crates full.

I also found a hydrangea whose flowers had already begun to dry on the bush. I gathered them up and hung them in our furnace room, next to some lavenders that have been drying there for a month or so.

This time of year one could easily sustain one's self on David's land.

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David also gave me a large branch from his kiwi tree. I found the leaves very charming and thought they would make very nice prints. My blogging friend, Mariann Ellis is printing leaves in her studio in Spain. Her system is a bit different than mine.

I roll or paint water color on the leaves and then place them on a piece of moistened and stretch watercolor paper. I splash a little extra color around and then cover them with weights, allowing them to sit for a few hours before releasing them.

I like the way the colors reveal the structure of the veins.

They make nice cards, wall hangings, decorative paper for bookmaking or whatever. Fall always includes a little leaf printing.

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My friend Mary, who was here last month brought me a huge stack of beautiful handmade paper from another friend back home. Leroy is an art professor at San Jose State University and he has been teaching a course on paper-making for years. With the stack was a wonderful note that proclaimed: "make more art with this."

Always liking to follow directions from the people I trust and love, I began to imagine playing with some of the brighter bits. I had some little plywood squares that I painted with various colors and chose a decorative paper to mount on each one.

This seemed like a nice background from which to make some collages.

But I got sidetracked by two of the marbleized papers. I kept seeing images in them. In the orange one it was primarily little people.

For the green one it was birds, mostly ducks.

For the blue one I decided to follow the original plan, which was to cut out some leaves from air-drying clay,

paint and mount them on the board.

I haven't been able to glue anything over the pink one yet, as I like it rather a lot the way it is. I plan to glue some nice white paper on the back so that they can be used as greeting cards.

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I have had a Martha Stewart book entitled Handmade Christmas, for so long that the pages have fallen out. In it she has a project I've always thought adorable. Making a box from an acorn. Her photo of the results is on the left. Mine, after following her very brief instructions, is on the right. I was so pleased with the results, until the next day. You notice that in both the photos the hollowed out acorn is separated from its little top, where a nice bit of cork has been securely glued. Martha neglects to mention that the shell bit shrinks a lot once it is dried and the two no longer fit one another. Martha! Really.

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Another wonderful surprise and spur to action came in the form of a delivery from far off Virginia. My blogger friend Janet sent me a prize from her fabric give-away contest. She has a wonderful home decorating blog called The Empty Nest, which I've been following for several years. She's always cooking up something interesting over there and often has fabulous contests. Last winter I won a handmade scarf!

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I found a sketch book this week which had some dream imagery that I  recorded long ago. This is one that has always stayed with me. I intend to develop it into a hard ground etching. It's entitled At the Pool Between Worlds. This is my sketch.

I have developed an illustration website called mymusetta.

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Nights have also been inspirational this week. Picture us at our apartment window, wide open, with our telescope aimed up at Jupiter. The night sky is incredibly these clear days. Even though we are in a village, there is so little light pollution here that we can see the planets and constellations in all their blazing glory, something impossible at our home in California. With our relatively inexpensive telescope we can see Jupiter's stripes and watch its various moons rotate around the planet. Each evening they are in a completely different position.

The sun is low enough in the sky now too to create those moments, mostly in the morning, when the sun shines through the windows and casts a golden glow on things, picking out particular objects to illuminate. It's a visual feast; I have to keep my camera near at hand.

Week 49: A Game, a Pair of Friends and Three Monsters

The wisteria has come and gone. Now our yellow rose is in bloom. They overlapped for just two days.

We were very happy to have our friends Arnault and Bénédicte come stay with us for a couple of days. The schools are on spring break, so they have some time and included the Maison Conti in their vacation plans. They came with their three boys who they call The Three Monsters. Of course, they are nothing of the sort.

Bénédicte is the oldest daughter of our friends Françoise and Bernard. We met the whole family when James spent an exchange year abroad with AFS, living in Brest during his junior year of high school in 1998. Since then, we have counted them among our very best friends. There are three daughters in the family, who have produced between them five sons. The whole extended family is dear to our hearts. 

Arnault is a nuclear engineer and spent a few days with us when we still lived in California. He has suppliers in Oregon and made the detour to visit us on one of his business trips. We have such a fond memory of sitting with him at a cafe overlooking San Francisco Bay. He was so delighted to be there and kept saying he had to pinch himself to know he was really awake. It was one of those perfect weekends, when you see your hometown newly through the enthusiastic eyes of a visitor. 

The family lives in Nantes. We have visited them there several times. They were spending a couple of days in the Loire Valley visiting châteaux. We ate breakfast and dinners together. While they were gone all day, we worked in the studio.

As a broad generalization, French children are very well-mannered. I will never forget a sign we once saw in the window of a restaurant in the Dordogne - No Children. Dogs Welcome. The owner, who was German, told us that dogs are much better behaved than children. She did mention, however, that of all nationalities she found French children to be the most restrained and polite.

Bénédicte is a teacher and works with disadvantaged children. She tells us that families are changing in France and some of the discipline which was built into the rhythm of family life is beginning to break down.

It certainly has not broken down in their family. It was really a pleasure to have the boys here. Their parents expect them to act politely and remain calm, not easy at their ages. They are a very interesting group. Each one unique.

photo by Arnault

Tanguy is eleven. He is remarkably brilliant. They have let him skip ahead one grade but hesitate to advance him further, even though he is still ahead of his classmates. He has an amazing memory for dates and is good at every subject. He has been reading adult literature from an early age.

photo by Arnault

Cedric, who is nine, may be more of an athlete than his brother. He is also the clown of the family. He is very big hearted and friendly. He was fascinated that I served the butter at breakfast in a little covered dish. He asked me if it was hard to arrange like that. He looked at my display of dishes in the kitchen and told me "bon présentation" (nicely arranged). I found it delightful!

photo by Arnault

Etienne, six, is a character. I think of him as the artist, since when we last visited the family in Nantes, he showed me his beautiful drawings. He is a real charmer. His father told us this story. He asked Etienne to do something and was ignored. He asked him why he hadn't followed the order given and Etienne replied that his mother always gave him three chances.

photo by Arnault

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If you haven't heard of the game Mölkky, (and frankly who has?) you're in for a treat here. Arnault discovered this game, invented in Finland, and introduced us to it by making us a Mölkky set. It's a throwing game and lots of fun. Arnault made our game from a single wood pole bought at the garden center. The set consists of 12 small pins, cut on the top at a 45ª angle and numbered. The puck is a short length of the same material left without the angle cut and rounded a little at the ends.

The rules are simple. A bit like bowling, you stand up the pins in a big bunch, placing the highest numbered ones on the inside (to protect them).

 

Two equal teams are created. It can be played one against one, two against two or more against more. Each individual on the team gets the chance to launch the puck at the stack of pins from a distance of about 10-12 ft away.

The object of the game is for a team to reach a score of exactly 50 points.  After launching the puck, if one of the pins falls down, the team receives the number of points written on the pin. If someone knocks more than one down, they receive one point for each pin that falls.  This makes it more advantageous to try to aim accurately.

 

The pins are dispersed as they are hit and are stood up wherever they fall, so the pins become further and further apart as the game progresses. If the puck fails to knock any pins down (and this is common) three consecutive times, the game is forfeited to the other team. If a team makes more than fifty points, their score returns to twenty-five, so one must be careful what one aims at.

Arnault's team, which included Rick, won the day. I never once hit a pin. The puck is very light and I didn't get the feel for how to aim it. I intend to practice, however, so I'm not so easily skunked next time.

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I got quite a lot of printmaking accomplished this week. There are a couple of theories about editioning prints which I have heard put forward. Traditionally, an edition is printed all in one go. Some people, however, print small batches as needed. I have handled my editioning both ways, but when it comes to a print that is colored a la poupée, you can't really have an edition of prints which are more or less the same in color and coverage without getting into the rhythm of printing them all together at the same time. The paper has to be the same type, same size, moistened the same so that the ink is taken uniformly. I have a number of plates I need to edition and I have begun to try to catch up with that.  

Cafe Girl is fairly efficient to ink once I get the edition rolling. Each spot of color is put on with a q-tip and wiped separately so it does take time. The plate is small however, so in the course of a few hours I was able to get an edition of 20 printed.

 

Village by the River is a different story. It takes at least 20 minutes to put the color on, as the plate is large and there are lots of details. I will need several dedicated days to accomplish an edition.

 

I did run the inked plate through the press a second time to get a more pastel effect. I like them both, so I'm trying to decide which way to run it. In either case it is fairly complicated to make an edition making all the prints similar.

 

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Happy May to all! I hope your days are full of colors and flowers.