Cyanotype toning options

[maverickaesthetics]

Since we had a little discussion in a different thread, which wasn't really intended to dive deeper into this subject, I thought I'd open a new thread to focus just on different toners for cyanotype prints.

I've done a lot of cyanotype printing and was interested in getting colours different from blue from the start. This was partly due to the fact that portraits in blue rarely look good and that cyanotype was my only printing process for quite a while at the start of my alt process journey. I have experimented with coffee and tea - and a lot of different types of tea. Most of the time, I was disappointed with the paper stain that most toners imparted on the print.

It wasn't until I took a workshop with Annette Golaz about 3 years ago around the time her fantastic book 'Cyanotype Toning - Using Botanicals to Tone Blueprints Naturally" came out, that I started to experiment further afield. The list in her book includes over 250 plants and their effects on cyanotype toning, complete with suitability and resulting colour. It made it fairly easy to narrow down the list of plants to try - since I was looking for a relatively neutral black and white print. Yes, I know, I could get this easier with other methods, but I was not printing with silver at the time.

So I set out to do a range of experiments and finally settled on fresh birch leaves as my go-to black and white toner for cyanotypes that doesn't stain the paper very much. Below is a test I made with different parts of the birch tree and with and without bleaching the print first.

And these are the notes I wrote down:

Cyanotype Toning Test: Birch
Chemistry: classic cyanotype formula
Paper: Hahnemuehle Platinum Rag

Toning agents:
1: fresh birch leaves, infused for 15 minutes with boiling water
2. mature birch catkins (the dry, brown ones), infused for 15 min with boiling water
3. fresh birch catkins (green, unopened), infused for 15 min with boiling water
4. Birch bark, infused for 15 min with boiling water
To see the effect of bleaching on the outcome, I've toned one strip unbleached and one strip bleached first. The mixed-up order in the bleached strips is due to a mistake of mine.
All toned strips were cut from the same original print to eliminate effects due to exposure, development, etc.

My favourite is either mature catkins or fresh leaves. The fresh leaves on the unbleached print produced a slightly warm black. However, there's a slight green tint to it, but it's very faint. The bleached print with fresh leaves also creates a warm brown with some yellow tones in the highlights.
The mature catkins produce a colder blue-black in the unbleached print and a slightly magenta tint in the brown of the bleached strip.

The results from the bark and the fresh catkins were rather disappointing.

It would be great to see your cyanotype toning results and hear about your experiences.

Jo

 

[KYsailor]

Jo,

Thanks so much for doing all this work - I really like some of the unbleached examples. I will have to give it a try, my UV system is down right now while I am building a new one ( 365 nm). When I get it up and running I will give these a try and post the results. I frequently use Platinum Revere which is similar to HPR and I use Arches WC paper ( yes it is buffered but I use citric acid in the cyano solution and it seems to work) and Canson Bristol XL... so I will see what works best with these toners.

Dave

 

[MattKing]

This thread seems like it would be of use to a lot of different users, so I've gone out on a limb and made it the first "Sticky" thread in this sub-forum.
Does anyone disagree?
Would anyone like to suggest some other choices in this sub-forum for "stickification" ( ) as well?
I'm happy to move that subject to a separate thread, if it is appropriate.

 

[koraks]

Does anyone disagree?

Not me in any case! I'd love for it to grow, but I've nothing to add to it presently. I hope others will contribute their findings.

The only thing I can say (but I've said it elsewhere already) is that I got quite pleasing results using a toner made of acorns, by boiling the de-husked nuts and letting them shimmer for a good amount of time. I tried leaves and complete acorns (including the husks) as well, but the cleanest result with the least staining I got with just the flesh of the acorns. I also tried European oak as well as American oak and got much stronger/better toning action with the latter. Which seems to make sense, as I recall that the goats we used to have when I was small ate the European acorns just fine, but wouldn't touch the American ones. I guess the latter are much higher in tannins.

 

[maverickaesthetics]

I'm posting another toning test that I did 2.5 years ago.
I've done quite a bit of toning experiments with tea. Since the tannins are the active component influencing the toning of cyanotypes, I experimented with teas that are high in tannin (having a tea business is quite an advantage in this regard). Generally, raw pu-erh tea (a less well-known tea from China) is the highest in tannin content. And since it makes a pale infusion, it's also not all that staining. Darjeeling would be a good other option or maybe even Japanese Sencha. I can't remember whether I tried these.

Anyhow, in this test, I tried a raw pu-erh tea, coffee cold and hot, as well as flax leaves (since we have a lot of these in New Zealand). Following are the notes I wrote back then.

Cyanotype Toning Test II: Tea, Coffee, Flax
Chemistry: classic cyanotype formula
Paper: Hahnemuehle Platinum Rag

Toning agents:
1: Raw Pu-erh tea, infused for 15 minutes with boiling water, then cooled to room temperature, with a pinch of chalk
2. Instant coffee, infused for 15 min with boiling water, then cooled to room temperature, with a pinch of chalk
3. Instant coffee, infused for 15 min with boiling water, toned hot, with a pinch of chalk
4. Flax leaves, infused for 15 min with boiling water, with a pinch of chalk

To see the effect of bleaching on the outcome, I've toned one strip unbleached and one strip bleached first.

All toned strips were cut from the same original print to eliminate effects due to exposure, development, etc.

My favourite is either one of the coffee toned prints on the bleached cyanotype. They produce an almost perfectly neutral grey (the hot toned print is slightly yellowish, while the cold toned print has almost no tint). However, the prints are relatively pale and low in contrast. Overexposing will likely help here, but I haven't tested that (yet).

Of the unbleached prints, the raw pu-erh and cold-toned coffee prints were the most neutral, but they were still rather blue. Maybe they work better with softer water (which we have, but I wanted to try out harder water by adding a pinch of chalk).

Flax stained the paper the least and the bleached print produced quite and attractive yellow grey.

 

[nmp]

This thread seems like it would be of use to a lot of different users, so I've gone out on a limb and made it the first "Sticky" thread in this sub-forum.
Does anyone disagree?
Would anyone like to suggest some other choices in this sub-forum for "stickification" ( ) as well?
I'm happy to move that subject to a separate thread, if it is appropriate.

If you ask me, I am not a big fan. For one thing, they take up the top of the page and you have scroll down to see if there is a new post on another subject - particularly annoying long after interest in the topic has waned. Also after awhile things start getting repetitive - no one reads the earlier posts. Additionally, there are many aspects of cyanotype toning that might need a separate thread of their own so there is a narrow focus on those topics that might be more beneficial to the someone trying to research and perhaps add new information in the future.

But this is only my opinion.

:Niranjan.

 

[MattKing]

If you ask me, I am not a big fan. For one thing, they take up the top of the page and you have scroll down to see if there is a new post on another subject - particularly annoying long after interest in the topic has waned. Also after awhile things start getting repetitive - no one reads the earlier posts. Additionally, there are many aspects of cyanotype toning that might need a separate thread of their own so there is a narrow focus on those topics that might be more beneficial to the someone trying to research and perhaps add new information in the future.

But this is only my opinion.

:Niranjan.

Thanks Niranjan.
The other approach might be to convert the content to an "Article" - if the purpose is to create an easily referenced common repository for things that one might refer to in other, more narrowly focused threads.

 

[fgorga]

I have spent some time recently exploring the toning of cyanotypes using the method described by Annette Golaz in her book, see: https://www.routledge.com/Cyanotype...ueprints-Naturally/Golaz/p/book/9780367553548.

Basically, she makes a 'tea' from many different botanical materials. The 'tea' can be made with distilled water (or rainwater) or by adding a small amount of calcium carbonate (chalk) to the water with different results for many botanicals. Cyanotype prints are soaked in the hot tea in order to tone them. No prior bleaching with strong alkali is used.

Anyway, here are my results from two days of experiments...

Many folks to whom I have shown the toned prints pick the sumac gall as particularly nice. I also like the tarragon and the wattle extract.

I have made two batches of finished (i.e. non-test) prints using this method, see https://porfolio.gorga.org/finished-work-toned-cyanotypes and https://porfolio.gorga.org/cornish-fair-toned-cyanotypes

 

[fgorga]

More experiments with sumac toning of cyanotypes.

Basically, I wanted to see if other sumac materials would give the same or similar results to the sumac gall tannins I have been using.

Thus, I obtained two other sumac dye stuffs ('sumac powder' and 'gallo tannins') from Botanical Colors, a company in Washington state (US) and toned some cyanotypes with these using Annette Golaz's method.

The sumac gallo tannins I used previously have one advantage over the two new materials. The sumac gall tannins dissolve quickly and completely in hot water. Thus it is a bit easier to work with because you do not need to steep the material in hot water for 15 minutes and then filter out the insoluble material. Both of the latter steps are required with the new materials.

Other than this issue all of these materials give very similar results as you can see below. Most critically, all of the sumac dye stuffs cause only minor staining of the paper.