Laura Campbell Fine Art

Now that I have my darkroom set up in San Luis, I can get back to Cyanotype printing again. I haven’t made any Cyanotypes since leaving Jerome in August. I’ve been using Hahnemuhle Copperplate 300gsm for gravure and really love the paper. It is slightly off white like the color of milk, is heavy weight, and has a texture that I find intriguing. I’m not a big texture person when it comes to printing photographs but this paper has a certain something that I like. I ran a few rough tests with aging Cyanotype sensitizer to find out how the paper would respond to the emulsion. I needed to determine what type of sizing, if any, it has and whether it would coat evenly. Sometimes this can be tricky with Cyanotype. I didn’t bother to apply the emulsion with a brush. I immersed the sheets of paper in a pool of emulsion as I would with fabric and hung them to drip-dry. The sheets dried evenly except at the bottom of the sheet where the emulsion pools when hang-drying. Fabric does this too so I wasn’t too concerned. I used the positive transparencies that I have lying around from gravure printing and exposed the paper with those. The Hahnemuhle held up well during processing. The first print of the eggslicer was developed in vinegar, bleached in ammonia, toned in selenium, and then toned again in pyrogallic acid. The paper responded well to the pyrogallic acid. The second image in the tray of the sand patterns was processed in vinegar, bleached lightly in ammonia, and given a hit of hydrogen peroxide. The richness and depth of the blue is quite impressive. I look forward to experimenting more with Cyanotype on Hahnemuhle…