I read your piece on drying with interest.
I have consistently found that drying naturally gives better results than
using a hair dryer.
Where there is a danger with natural drying is where the drying process
takes so long that solutions sink into the paper.
This is easily overcome either by sizing or by drying in a warm stream of
air from a fan heater which does not give the localised hot spots that tend
to come with hair dryers.
It is also worth remembering the principle that heat speeds up chemical
reactions and that this can lead to uneven bronzing and, in gum
prints,uneven insolubilisation.
I>When I read Mike Ware's and John Barnier's description of the blue in
>"old" cyanotype "gurgling down the drain" these events were among the
>thoughts that came to mind and I wondered how their prints were dried. The
>article in Photo Techniques didn't say.
>If I can get ahold of some "new" emulsion and some good fe am cit, I'll
>y some tests. Meanwhile, how do other people dry cyanotype?
I am all in favour of experimentation and exploration of new ways of doing
things. In fact I have got four or five myself in the fields of gum,
kallitype and platinum and gum platinum printing. But as John Barnier
says, and thanks Judy for the copy, some printers produce rich cyanotypes
using the old simple method with no addded brighteners !
If the cyanotype is given one coat of sensitiser with a brush and dried
naturally and then exposed under a continuous tone neg with a density range
up to 1.4 until everything except the highlights is either reversed or has
turned dark blue,the resulting print will have a full range of tones with
rich shadows and fine detail in the highlights.
I have even got five and six year olds in an infants school to produce
prints like this.
The method is safe, simple and cheap and produces rich prints with great
subtlety in tone and detail.. They rival platinum if you like blue.
Terry King
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