A couple of years ago, while I was traveling by car in the south of Italy, I was talking with a friend from Naples, photographer himself, about alternative print techniques. In particular, I was talking about superimposing brown prints, or Van Dyke brown, to cyanotype prints.

The answer was quick and laconic:

– Blue and brown is not allowed! (NT: in Italian the rhyme goes with a word that means rude, boor)

There’s also the twin proverb to complete the opera: “black and brown never allowed”.

In reality, superimposing iron salts brown print on cyanotype is a technique, as every technique, that could be interesting, mostly when printing the hardest negatives or to recover bad VDB prints. This phrase could be rude, but actually in alternative techniques world it is better to let yourself go, letting destiny play its trickeries, leaving space to serendipity and accepting what fate will give to you. Those who work with this kind of prints are used to it to discover an alternative look, produce different images to the ones we’re used to, create unique prints. This is the reason why there’s nothing better than case or, if we want, chaos.

This is the reason why, in general, I suggest the apprentices of alternative techniques not to throw away anything, not even the worst print; it could become an interesting element to (re-) work on. New techniques, combinations and possibilities are discovered every day and that bad platinum once thrown away could be the perfect one to test the new learned technique.

The technical advantage when superimposing cyanotype and VDB is that the first technique requires a softer negative than the second one. Which means that with a hard negative some tones can be covered with the blue of the cyanotype, some others with the brown of the VDB print. As the colors are completely different, dualtone, posterization and solarization are often interesting results.

It is possible to print cyanotype before and VDB after, or inverting the order. In the second case though, as the classical cyanotype formula contains potassium ferrocyanide, an ingredient used in many formulas to reduce the density of images and negatives overexposed or over developed, the silver image of the VDB print is largely damaged when the cyanotype solution has to be coated. Even printing a cyanotype before and a VDB after, the first print is a little corroded by the second coating, but the effect is contained and the results are interesting.

As VDB has harder negatives, the maybe fair high lights of the cyanotype prints are pleasantly filled up by the ferric salt print, creating a particular dualtone effect. The cyanotype blue will be desaturated in the presence of brown, turning it darker and more neuter, thing that I personally find more pleasant than the brilliant color of the direct cyanotype prints.

The picture inside this article has been shot in occasion of the Festa della Madonna dell’Avvocata, when the majority of the inhabitants of a couple of villages in the Amalfi coast goes up to the sanctuary and pass their entire day dancing the local tammuriata (NT: a typical style of music from the south of Italy). I shot this picture with an old mechanic OM-2, charged with FP4 Plus, Inter-positive on RC paper and negative enlarged on Adox film. Unfortunately the negative was too hard and I had to soften it with Dupont 4-R, Ederís harmonizing reducer. I printed a couple of cyan before soften it, among those the one I’m talking about, on the backside of an Arche Platine sheet where a couple of years ago I had already printed something with bichromate gum. As the negative was too hard, I superimposed a VDB print using the same negative. The cyanotype remains in shadows while VDB fills affably up the middle tones of the image. The cyanotype emerges inside the faces, underlining the visage characteristics. There’s still something missing in lights that I will fix when I’ll have some time and desire, adding another couple of bichromate gum layers to enrich the lights and let everything compenetrate.

In any case, something born as error could turn into interesting images. Even if some time can also be rude…

All of the cyanotype toning formulas that I tried, completely bleaching the image in an alkali and re-developing it in a tanning agent for a long time, gave red-browned flat hues with a little dmax. I always obtained best results with long tanning bathes and a quick immersion in a diluted alkali, which gave a print with warm grey, brown or pink lights, while shadows are intense blue, slightly violet or black. A part of the original blue of the cyanotype is conserved in the final print, giving not only a cold hue to shadows, but also keeping relatively high the dmax, penalized by a complete alkaline whitening.

I think this is cyanotype toning big deal. The contrast drop in the middle tones can be corrected applying the right curve, the flattening of the high lights often creates a delicate effect of softness and lightness; but the loss of shadow density is a problem that still doesn’t have a solution. Certain images work even without blacks, all played on pastel colors, but others need the strength of intense and deep shadows.

Toning formulas that promise deep blacks, neutral lights and no paper dyeing (such as tea or concentrated tannic acid) are found in literature. In general they are variants of the procedure described at the beginning: alkali and tanning. The order of baths, the repetition or not of the successive immersions, ph control, intermediate washings and the tanning or/and alkali nature are the changeable elements. Those variations have a strong impact on final return, but they always have the same denominator: flatness of hues and dmax reduction. But I’m still searching for the magical combination that intensify a cyanotype rather than reducing it, turning the print into a palladium image infinitely less expensive.

Serendipity against severity

Moloch. Dualtone cyanotype: 30″ bleach 1%, acetic acid 0.1%, 5′ tannic acid1%, 5′ acetic acid 0.1%. Fabriano Paper 50, 25x35cm; image dimension: 18x27cm.

Yesterday night I made some attempts with some formulas. As usual, I didn’t follow a scientific method but a creative one, letting creativity and fate play their role. I tried in the past to formalize with strictness dark room tests, but I always failed. The thing is that some of the variables are hard to control, as temperature and environment humidity. Paper characteristics change from one stock to another and little variations are amplified. Moreover, because of the never-ending number of dissimilarities, it is required an infinite patience. It would be necessary to made them change one of a time, so I’d need thousands and thousands of tests and dark room days. Obviously, only printing Stouffer palettes to have the maximum rigor and the best ease of interpretation. This way, no image will be printed and life will be spent in taking boring tests. I’m sorry, but I’m a photographer and I’m not a lab technician. Life’s too short and all of the pictures I don’t take are images lost forever.

In certain cases I rather let variables evolve and print in an intuitive, not rigorous manner. Serendipity is a gift useful as much as meticulousness, while studying alternative techniques. By the way, a similar approach is found in many other areas. A sailboat can be managed because it gives back equilibrium; controlling every detail in a so difficult system or writing motion equations would be impossible.

Cyanotype toning material

Aamon. Cyanotype toning: 5′ tannic acid 1%, 5′ ammonia 1%, 5′ acetic acid 0,1%. Dark points are inside the negative and do not depend from toning. Rives BFK Paper, 28x38cm. Image dimension 18x26cm.

I therefore used a digital negative with color and curve adapted to carbon print. Cyanotype requires a lower difference of density, which means that images printed with those negatives will have completely posterized and white light, a strong contrast and a marked grain. In this case, those defects are not frustrating. I can see how toning behave with completely white lights in zones that didn’t receive any exposition. Too high contrast compensates the toning flatness. Image grain can be amplified or reduced during the process, and this is interesting information too.

I used daemon pictures, the Mascarons du Pont Neuf of Paris, because their negatives have many transparent parts, so I do have large zones in prints where blue is the deepest I can obtain on cyanotypes. Negatives are exposed for 12 minutes, the reference exposition timing, that in my case gave the deepest blue I can achieve. A higher exposition blends shadows without augmenting dmax.

It is recycle paper, and those are the variables that I deliberately choose not to control. It is the back of some not successful gum prints, VDB or cyanotypes. It is a paper that already went under chemical and mechanical treatments. Some sheets are sized to gelatine and some no. Brands are from Arche Platine, Fabriano Artistico, Fabriano 50, Rives BFK, Canson “C” grain. Some cyanotypes, before toning, have been left for some days oxidizing, to obtain a definitive color, some other only a few hours.

Tannic acid is an old 1994 package. In every case, due to past experiences, I still haven’t seen big differences between tannic acid concentration and solution (except for the paper hue due to tea). So I’d say that the active ingredient is still quite functioning.

Kai Hamman cyanotype toning

Moloch. Complete cyanotype toning: 5′ ammonia 1%, 1′ acetic acid 0.1%, 5′ tannic acid 1%, 5′ acetic acid 0.1%. Bubble stains were present on paper even before printing the cyanotype and they do not depend from toning. Fabriano Paper Rives BFK, 28x38cm; image dimension: 17x26cm.

Kai Hamann published a toning procedure whom results, if not modified during scanning, are extremely astonishing. The reported examples have a pink hue that I easily recognize, some other are perfectly neutral, but most of all shadows have an intense and deep black, as far as in video some prints seem palladium ones or perfect Van Dyke Browns.

Resuming the procedure described on his site, Kai Hammann toning is the following: acetic acid 1%, water washing, ammonia 0,5% between 1 and 16 minutes depending on the required hue, water washing, acetic acid 1%, water washing, tannic acid 1% for some minutes, acetic acid washing 1%. At that time he suggests a method to control the final hue of the print, adding one more softly alkali bath after the last washing, but I didn’t explore this way because the last acid bath in Kai Hamann’s table seem having the most cold and neutral hues, whose I’m interested in.

Carrying out the procedure to the letter gave wonderful results, often with beautiful hues, but it was still impossible to obtain a black print and contain the dmax loss. Bleaching the image with ammonia gave prints with pink-browned lights and vaguely neutral shadows, something like black-purplish but absolutely not deep. Bleaching only a part of prints for some seconds, I obtain a familiar effect of warm gray high lights and purplish blue shadows, but even in this case I lose dmax.

Therefore the proposed toning technique doesn’t work for me. I do not know if it is due to the ammonia or tannic acid quality, water or –more probably- cyanotype formula and composition (ammoniacal ferric citrate is a bad defined compound and it varies from package to package).

Interesting collateral and useful information –long live serendipity!- is that the use of acetic acid bath, even if diluted, for example 0.1%, between alkali and tannic, sensibly preserves the bath itself from contamination. Bathing even only one picture directly from an alkalic bath to tannic acid turns this last into a brown compound and easily gets the paper dirty. In two or three images the tannic solution is practically useless. Even an intermediate water bath easily contaminates the tannic acid and the washing bath becomes toning itself, therefore it must be regularly changed. Acetic acid bath gets less dirty and most of all allowed the usage of tannic acid during the entire session without any visible alteration.

Support for hydrochloric acid cyanotype

Hydrochloric acid is often cited as cyanotype support. It is said to augment blue dmax, giving a darker and deeper hue to shadows, almost black, but also providing neutral middle tones, such as metallic grey. I found indications on its use as first developing bath (I use very diluted acetic acid or water) or toning-support.

I tried this last procedure, immersing a washed and dried cyanotype in a hydrochloric acid 2% solution for 20’, but the color hasn’t changed at all and the dmax absolutely hasn’t augmented.

I don’t want to try higher concentrations, because hydrochloric acid, more than dangerous, gets paper fibers fragile. I still have to verify if hydrochloric acid as development bath achieve the described results. I wouldn’t be willing to use concentrated acid anyway, since some sources cite the possibility of expansion for cyanide gases when a not perfectly washed cyanotype is bathed in an acid.

Paper developer as alkali in cyanotype toning

Some sources cites ammonia and tannic acid toning as “red brown”, while giving a toning formula of “grey black” that uses a paper developer as alkali bath instead of ammonia or sodium carbonate. I tried this combination too, using a new diluted developer 1+9.

I was expecting a hue slightly different from the ammonia one, not to hope in dmax miracles. I actually obtained wonderful purplish hues, most of all in the tannic acid combinations, some seconds inside the developer and then tannic acid again, but it is absolutely impossible to obtain black cyanotypes without dmax loss during toning.

Black cyanotype is still far away

All of the described cyanotype toning techniques makes splendid results, particular and unique images, delicate hues, optimal gum prints backgrounds, etc… No one that I tried, at least in my case, is able to produce a black toning, intensification or at least a limited dmax loss, which happens every time I tone a cyanotype. A hydrochloric acid bath particularly seems not to influence a washed and dried cyanotype.

Collateral information, a useful forethought consists in using acetic acid baths between alkali and tannic acid to preserve this last solution, sensibly augmenting its life.

The majority of cyanotype tonings use two baths: a tanning agent as tea, coffee or, obviously, the tannic acid itself and an alkali, usually sodium carbonate. Their order can be inverted, with or without washing before and between the two baths, in different concentrations… all of the combinations give give quite different effects. It is also possible to repeat toning, for example tanning-alkali-tanning.

Possibilities are never-ending.

Ammonia as basic bath is an alternative to calcium carbonate that is often cited in literature. Yesterday night I made some preliminary tests using a 13% ammonia solution bought from the grocer store and the discount soluble coffee. All of the prints were discards on which make tests, too contrasted pictures, overexposed, with stains or too much pixelated. I used them just to familiarize with the procedure.

I tried some baths using 40ml, 20ml and 10ml of 13% diluted ammonia in a liter of water. As the color changed rapidly, I choose the 10ml per liter solution and it is probably possible to use a smaller concentration. Besides, if you want to completely bleach the image, it is better to use 40ml.

Lonesome ammonia in cyanotype tonings

The two-second diluted ammonia bath gives a beautiful purplish color, which loses significantly density during the water washing. If the print is dried without washing, the hue gets lost during the drying. It only remains a slight purple and cold tonality that is more pleasurable than the brilliant not toned blue cyanotype, but the bath reduces the dmax and flattens the tones at the same time. I don’t like this result at all! And don’t forget the preservation and stability problems described in the following paragraphs.

When used to bleach a cyanotype, ammonia behaves as a linear reducer, which means that it turns down the density of the entire print, both of shadows and lights. Its final hue is dark blue, more pleasurable than the one obtained bleaching into peroxide, which produces a greenish unpleasant dominant.

In any case, bleaching without redeveloping in a tanning agent is something to be avoided, because this procedure transforms the prussian blue in ferric hydroxide, which is unstable. Only tanning can guarantee a correct preservation of the images. In fact, as already said in basicity and color of blue prints, cyanotype tonings are stable even when time goes by because tanning agents transform again ferric hydroxide in ferrotannic (or ferrogallic) compounds. They are extremely stable compounds, used for ink of hand-copied books that past through centuries without paling.

Tea or coffee in cyanotype tonings

After bleaching a print, I put it in a bath with 50g of soluble coffee and 500ml of water, but unfortunately this last didn’t put on density. Notwithstanding the image is delicate and pleasurable, almost transparent, neutral grey with a slightly blue dominant in deepest shadows.

Writer Gudrun Mebs portrait. Split-tone cyanotype colored by tea and toned for some seconds in an ammonia bath. Dimension: 31x22cm.

I only hope coffee would have been enough to convert the biggest part of the ferric hydroxide, in a way that the image doesn’t significantly change in time.

The coffee bath didn’t work for any image, even in short ammonia bath or long coffee bath (I left one image the entire night inside the bath and it only turned a little brown hue, moreover maculated. Advantage: it now has a wonderful coffee scent!).

Maybe the bath concentration must be augmented, even if coffee was completely black. I though, after buying the package, noticed that it only have 40% coffee and the rest additives, so maybe it is necessary a real coffee.

I then worked with the tea bath: 4 tea bags in boiling water.

The best result of the entire session came with a 3-minutes tea bath followed by 2/3-seconds quick immersion inside the ammonia bath. The print gets a pleasing split-tone effect, dark blue shadows and warm grey vaguely pink lights.

Na2CO3 comparison and gelatine tanning in cyanotype toning

Using tea and sodium carbonate instead of ammonia turns hue into more brown and yellow color. Pure tannic acid and sodium carbonate have high pink lights, almost unpleasant, but some wonderful black shadows. Tea and ammonia instead are between the two, lights of a neutral grey, pink and brown that I found genuinely nice and dark blue shadows.

Tea effect on a paper sized with gelatine. From the bottom you can see the white reference of the scanner, the tea colored paper, the brown tanned gelatine, the cyanotype black border, the image.

A collateral effect of the experiments is the toning effect on gelatine-sized paper. In fact, one of the prints was only-shadows cyanotype base on Rives BFK. I wanted to put on it bichromed gums that but I never did it, so the paper was sized after the cyanotype print with a 5% hardened in formaldehyde gelatine solution. The gelatine is strongly tanned by tea, turning in a browned-pink pronounced color. If you want to tone a cyanotype print as a bichromed gum base and if you want to obtain some pure whites, toning must be done before sizing. On the contrary, you can size a print before toning if you want to amplify the tea color on paper.

Tanning acidification in cyanotype toning

Some forum recommend to slightly acidify tannates bath, some other suggest an acid bath to rapidly stop the toning effect. Those advices are contradictory, so I tried to add a drop of acetic acid to tea, to verify how a cyanotype behaves in an acid-tanning bath. Tea suddenly got clear, passing from dark brown to light brown, but stopped functioning. Prints inside acid cyanotype simply didn’t tone.

I therefore think that an acid bath is more useful as tanning arrest than as tanning additive.

Some weeks ago, talking with famous French palladium printer Jean Claude Mougin, we started discussing about cyanotype print hue. In that occasion, he said that when cyanotype tends to violet is because paper is probably basic and could contain a buffer of carbonates. As is common knowledge, cyanotypes prefer an acid environment and preserving them in a basic environment could harm their life span. Therefore, it should be better to avoid basic paper.

I tested several cyanotype papers and cheap drawing papers are my favorite; the nice watercolor paper, neutral and 100% cotton, gave inferior visual results. In particular, drawing papers have a violet tone that I found more agreeable than the cyan of the more noble ones.

Therefore I suppose those papers contain a buffer of carbonates and this could harm the life span of prints.

The development I use is more acid though, so I hope this can neutralize the paper buffer.

Dick Arentz, in his book about platinum print, another technique adapted to acid environment, explains that on modern papers, which almost all contains carbonates buffer, a double coating of sensitizer highly augment the tirage quality. Dick Arentz speculates on the fact that the first coating could be necessary to neutralize the carbonates on paper and prepare a correct environment to receive the second coating. On the other hand, pre-acidification baths practice is well known to every platinum and palladium printers, a coating of acid solution such as the palladium sensitizer equals to a mild pre-acidification, so the theory seems to make sense. In every case, if a first coating of product does help to neutralize the buffer, 10 minute of washing in an acid bath should be more than sufficient to guarantee a not excessively alkaline environment.

Moreover the majority of my cyanotypes are toned to tea with a final alkaline bath. In Mike Ware’s cyanotype book “ferric gallate” and “ferric tannate” are two stable compounds. And they are the compounds contained inside inks used for 2000 years; medieval books are written with the same product contained in cyanotype toning. This is exact only when tannic acid and sodium carbonate are mixed, and not through more complex chemistries such as a cyanotype on a paper with a buffer toned to tea. Anyway I think that the presence of an alkaline buffer doesn’t modify the product present in the print, therefore the preservation of my prints should be relatively long.

Unfortunately, the practice to add a buffer inside paper is recent, so I don’t think there’s a right and satisfying answer to cyanotype storage on modern papers. Cyanotypes I prepared some months ago didn’t move, maybe in ten years I’ll be more serene, nevertheless I’m optimistic.

Cyanotype is known to be stable as platinum or pigment prints, so I don’t think it is terribly sensitive. Tone in presence of buffer should ameliorate the stability compared to a normal cyanotype. Moreover, I’m not extremely interested into conservation problem; if my prints surpass 50 years, I’m satisfied. If it’s 100 or 500 years, well it doesn’t matter to me. I’m interested into reaching the soul of my contemporaries, during my life, what happens next I don’t care. It would be a problem if in 5 months all the prints would turn into green, as with inkjet prints of some years ago. But when a procedure guarantees some decades of life, well I’m completely satisfied.

So I will keep on printing cyanotypes on papers that have a violet tone, so sweet compared to the saturated and brilliant obtained on more neutral papers.

It is known and decanted the importance of taking notes and conform to standard all the procedures when working in dark room, mostly when working with antique techniques. But sometimes it is funny to let yourself go and dare. The majority of the prints will be thrown away, but sometime you can get unique results that you would have never been able to obtain if following the known ways. Something you’ve never seen before, because it is born with the help of destiny.

This is the history of one of those images.

Couple of years ago, far 2004/2005, I was fighting with salted paper, and I couldn’t print more than a pair of decent images. I couldn’t understand which was the variable that stonewalled. I was testing several types of paper, sizing, hardening… I found the right combination for a great result, I prepared 20 sheets with as much attention as I could, but in the end no one was working. There must be some kind of variable that I couldn’t control that was making fun of me. The result was nothing but tons of lost hours and lots of paper ready to be sensitized and left in the dark room to get older.

Today I accidentally found a folder with thirty of those sized and salted papers. Arche Acquarelle, Fabriano Artistico, Rives BFK. Each one had a different concentration of gelatine, a different hardening, a different quantity of salt. All of those paper where mixed together, discards and failings who were waiting to be used. I say this is the good occasion to play with some cyanotypes.

As I’m not sure that sodium chloride match with cyanotype (chloride sounds like basic), I prepared a bath with 10g of citric acid and 3 liters of water. Ph is almost 3, strongly acid. Ok. Let’s put all of my sheets in it, one by one. I measure Ph again and we’re now backing to 4-5. I add one more liter of water and 2cc of acetic acid at 80%. Ph is now still at 4. A thimbleful of acetic acid, how much? Well, a cork of my bottle…

I lay my sheets to dry, sensitize with classic cyan, 0.8+0.8 for two on 18×28.

I sweep the brush without even trace the borders with the pencil, desiccation with warm dryer (I never do it, but who cares, I’m playing!). I don’t measure the time of drying (Usually I use 10’ between the first and the second coating and 30’ before the exposition). Under UV for, I don’t know, 15 minutes? Digital negative for Van Dyke, then too much contrasted, but who cares, I’m playing, ain’t I?

The image is quite beautiful when getting out of the printing frame. It’s strange. It generally seems grayer… I put it on the acid water and suddenly it turns into deep blue, I’ve never seen something so quick. Suddenly though, blue filaments fill the water and the image is completely cancelled. Bright lights completely burnt, a few shadows almost closed. What a pity, this paper was nice and thin. Probably gelatine doesn’t let cyanotype to attach paper and it’s completely washed away. I made some more prints with some drops of wetting agent to augment the penetration, but I obtain bad results.

At the end of the afternoon I have a series of awful cyanotypes. What I was expecting? Working with precision is a rule that worth the while. Fantasy and game don’t bring any result. Proust said that big works starts while bored, not inspired. Who knows if he was a dark room lover?

I’m a little bit depressed. There’s nothing worst than a day in dark room without any decent result. Well, I can at least use the cyanotypes to test toning. I always used bleach as whitener; let’s see what happens using the sodium carbonate. I also recently read that toning to tannic acid doesn’t change the appearance of the image (as I verified), but putting a cyan toning to tannic acid inside the carbonate sodium is far different from a direct cyan inside carbonate… Well, cyan takes two days to oxidize and get blue, but who cares, I’m only enjoying myself…

I prepare a tea bought at the supermarket, 5 tea bag for a smoking teapot. 12g of carbonate and 600ml of water. Tea is boiling, but who cares? I put the first image inside, an old Fabriano Artistico that quickly turn into tea color. I leave it there, but I don’t take care of time. It doesn’t matter; I just want to see if it has the same pink I get with bleach. Some minutes of washing and then carbonate. The image suddenly changes, turning into red brick in a few seconds.

I then see something strange and magnificent, the image is negative.

I put it into water, dazed. Toning took from 2 to 10 second; shadows are posterized and brighter than the middle grays. Lights are red brick colored.

I wash everything for a few minutes and put it to dry, hoping it doesn’t change. Meanwhile, I try to tone a dozen of cyanotypes, but I absolutely do not obtain the result I got before.

The print only has 4 tones. Everything from the middle tones is red-bricked. Something over an intense brown, such as some middle of the Van Dyke Brown. Shadows are divided in two. There’s a part which is less intense, it is white green with lot of brown. The other part is white-light blue with brown again. The fact that they’re posterized with a brighter color makes the image a mixture of positive and negative. Tea tone gives somehow an antique and scrambled aspect.

Lethally beautiful, absolutely irreproducible.

I should dig in the salted paper of a couple of years ago and in all the casualties that I met today. Scanning doesn’t give the idea at all, it’s a unique print and I will hold it tight.

During last weekend I personally tested several types of paper to print in cyanotype.

Requisites for cyanotype paper

The paper must satisfy all the following exigencies.

It must produce deep and almost black blues, not pale or washed-out light-blues. This is essential to get brilliant and bright blue prints, which would be consequently rather flat.

It must have a satin surface; as I’m contact printing 6×12 negatives, fine details become absolutely fundamental.

It must have an important weight to ensure flatness after coating. Papers whom embark too much, even if bone dry, gets the adherence with the negative hardly. On a textured paper can also not be a problem, but on a satin surface sudden appear unpleasant blurred spots.

The image does not have to fade during rinsing. Cyanotypes normally loose density during this phase. Some types of paper though release some filaments of blue during the first minutes of washing. This generally produces a granular and irregular aspect, it makes necessary longer exposition and commonly generate less fine images.

It must be cheap. I’m very annoyed by watercolor paper that costs 5euros per sheet.

Naturally I have to like it. It must have a pleasant surface and consistence, but most of all produce the right print. This last point is highly subjective and personal.

Other papers used for cyanotype print

I printed on Gerstaecker Watercolor (orrible paper, excellent blues), Fabriano Artistico, Canson, Arches Platine, White Nights, COT-32. They all present a strong loss of image during first wash. Two kinds of paper that do not present this problem are Shoeller Durex 250g and an Arche paper which I do not know the precise name. Water doesn’t get dirty even after many washes and the image nearly weaken. The problem is that Schoeller embark with dishonor and Arche is too much textured.

Test for cyanotypes paper

I went buying some sheets of paper. The requisite of price and surface brought me to technical paper: C grain 224g, Lavis Technique 250g, Lavis Vinci 300g, Montval 300g, Miner Multitecnica 400g, Bristol Extra Vinci 350g. Prices go from 1,20 and 2 euros per sheet sized 50x65cm. Some of them are the most textured.

The test is not so strict, no Stouffer palette and no control to stop all the variables. I simply took 3 or 4 negatives and tried to obtain good prints. UV exposition varies from print to print and surely playing with time can amplify or reduce differences.

The other variables are more or less fixed: 0.1ml+0.1ml in one coating of “classical” solution on a surface 6,4×12,4 cm. As the paper is no more brilliant, I use a drier to eliminate any trace of moisture. UV exposition and 3 washing soaks of 1, 3 and 5 minute each. The first two are prepared with 1 liter of water and 1 ml of 80% of acetic acid, the last one with pure water.

Results on papers adapted for cyanotype print

All of the papers loose density. The effect is more or less prominent, but it could depend from different expositions. Normally the Miner Multitecnica is the one that mostly suffer this problem and that has the most granular print. However, 30×40 cm is an extremely nice print, even if it’s absolutely to discard for the little contact prints on which I’m working.

All of the papers print a deep, lightly violet blue, which I do found pleasant related to the classical saturated and brilliant blue of the cyanotypes. Montval is the exception, as it has a completely different color: it is a cyan more similar to aqua green.

All those papers, because of the high weight, are absolutely flat and stable. A pleasure compared to Shoeller.

They’re all satin, even if they go from the smoothest to the fine grain. Bristol 350g is the smoothest at all.

This last one is contrasted more than any other. Having a smoother paper can be useful printing analogical negatives, as it allows printing negatives too hard for cyanotype. A contrasted paper is maybe more performing with digital negatives. I will verify this hypothesis as soon as I can.

All things considered, Bristol 350g seems to be the satin paper more indicated to cyanotype print, mixing an enjoyable color, deep blues, a perfectly smooth and detailed surface, scarce loss during washing with a light granular effect. If we add the perfect dimensional stability, the high contrast (that could be useful to digital negatives too) and the fact that is one of the cheapest I tried, it’s easy understand that it will be my reference paper.