Re: searching for the elusive cyanotype rex

I posted the mention of the Ag article.

Cyanotype Rex has been much described, for example at
http://www.viewcamera.com/pdf/2005/king.pdf (also covers chrysotype
rex) and several times I've made suggestions about the process involved.
It has been demonstrated at two APIS events and other conferences, and
will be described again in a forthcoming RPS Historical group
publication. I saw a number of examples for real a year ago and I think
they live up to the claims that Terry makes for them. I can assure you
your suspicions are totally unfounded.

I talked to him about the process then, and we agreed it was essentially
similar to the methods I'd played with in the 1990s, exposing a paper
with a standard ferric oxalate sensitiser and then using an appropriate
developer solution to produce kallitype or gold or platinum prints. I
think he uses lower concentrations of developer than I tried and tends
to flow them on (I used rod or brush for testing, and trays for making
some prints.) From my experience it is easy to get them to work, but
hard to get some - particularly gold - to work well - perhaps lots of
practical manipulation detail involved.

Terry King will also be making detailed instructions available for those
that need them in the New Year, publishing them at a relatively low
cost. As I understand it these should be unnecessary, but will contain
some useful advice to save repeating many of his experiments. I imagine
he will also be running workshops at some time on them. So contact him:
terryaking@aol.com if you are interested.

I don't know why you couldn't get anything from the instructions by
Michael Maunder. If he says they work for him, I'm sure they do.
Presumably the faster speed means rather more care has to be taken about
exposure of the paper to light during coating. I'd suspect the iron
compound you are using is perhaps not really potassium hexacyanoferrate(II)

Regards,

Peter

Peter Marshall
petermarshall@cix.co.uk +44 (0)1784 456474
31 Budebury Rd, STAINES, Middx, TW18 2AZ, UK
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and elsewhere......

ryberg wrote:

> Last October someone posted a summary of an article in a British
>magazine named AG. The summary offered enough information to make me
>interested but not enough to try it so I bought the magazine. The article
>by Michael Maunder says that a sheet of paper coated only with a solution of
>ferric ammonium citrate can be much faster than the traditional cyanotype
>mixture of FAC and potassium ferricyanide. To take advantage of this speed
>one developes by brushing on a solution of potassium ferrOcyanide--NOT the
>usual ferric salt.
> I finally located some of the fairly obscure ferrous salt and tried.
>Several times. I emailed Mr. Maunder who could not find anything wrong with
>the process as I described what I did. He suggested that I might be using a
>better quality of paper and that I should try plain old copy paper, which I
>did. No luck. I could give details of what Maunder says to do but I
>hesitate to offer the list information which I can't make work.
> Has anyone ever read anything about this process? Is it related to the
>much praised but NEVER described cyanotype rex I suspect that is a
>non-existant beast.
>Charles Portland Or
>
>
>
>
Received on Tue Dec 13 01:37:16 2005