Photographs by Frank

Hot, sunny, summer days… good for making anthotypes, not so good for the anthotypist.

This batch was made on Friday.

[scrollGallery id=885 – autoscroll = false width = 600 height = 600 useCaptions = true]

Note: These were scanned with a new scanner. (The printer in our all-in-one device died and had to be replaced.). Thus, these scans are much redder than the originals. I’ll have to work to sort that out, but it is time to get yet another batch ‘cooking’ now!

Yesterday dawned bright and sunny. Thus, I was ‘busy’ making anthotypes.

I put ‘busy’ in quotes because making anthotypes is mostly about waiting if you have the paper already prepared. I spent about an hour first thing in the morning gathering and arranging material on various sheets of paper and placed everything out in the sun. The paprika anthotypes only take about an hour to expose but the turmeric anthotypes spent all day sitting outside.

In the early evening, I processed the prints. The images made with paprika get sprayed with an acrylic protective spray. The ones with turmeric get sprayed with 5% sodium carbonate (washing soda). In both cases these treatments are needed to slow the fading of the pigments that form the image.

I used a large chunk of the rest of the day to hand-color several more inkjet prints. More on that later.

[scrollGallery id=883 – autoscroll = false width = 600 height = 600 useCaptions = true]

About a year ago, I made a series of anthotypes* using an extract of turmeric (see: post 1, post 2, and post 3).

Turmeric is a commonly used material for making anthtotypes. However, in anticipation of the inaugural World Anthotype Day I have spent the past week or so experimenting with making anthotypes with less commonly used materials as the source of pigment. Specifically, I made images with both a water-based extract of red cabbage and an organic solvent-based extract of paprika.

With the red cabbage I am able to make both blue and pink (think of the colors associated with newborn babies) images. However, these images (not shown) are of low contrast as the starting colors are fairly pale.

Additionally, the exposures required are long… think multiple days in the sun. Having long stretches of bright sunny days is not typical New Hampshire weather even in July. So I am not sure how practical this process would be. Furthermore, I am not a particularly patient soul. Lastly, baby blue and baby pink are just not colors that I am particularly fond of.

Thus, I don’t think that I will be pursuing red cabbage anthotypes much further.

However, I have been getting very nice results using an orange-yellow pigment extracted from paprika with an organic solvent. For my first attempts I used rubbing alcohol (iso-propanol) which is the solvent of choice for making turmeric anthotypes. I was able to make images with very short (for anthotypes) exposures (e.g. an hour or less). The images were fairly low contrast as the initial extract was not particularly dark. The chemist in me thought that using a less polar solvent might give better results and thus I tried making an extract of paprika using mineral spirits**. This worked like a charm. The details of my procedure and the results of my experiments can be found in this pdf file.

Shown below are two successful paprika anthotypes (exposure time 45-60 min in full July sun) and two new turmeric anthotypes (exposure time 5-6 hours).

The first image is on a nice warm Strathmore Series 400 drawing paper. The remaining three images are on Strathmore Vision drawing paper.

The turmeric images were sprayed with 5% sodium carbonate (washing soda) in order to stabilize them and to increase the contrast. The paprika images were sprayed with an acrylic fixative in order to stabilize them.

[scrollGallery id=880 – autoscroll = false width = 600 height = 600 useCaptions = true]

* Anthotypes are images made using plant-derived pigments. One makes an extract of some colored plant part (often petals from a flower) and coats paper with the extract. When the paper is dry, one places objects (or, less commonly, a positive transparency) on the paper and then places a piece of glass atop the objects. This “sandwich” is the placed in a sunny spot and left for a period of time… certainly hours and often days. The sunlight fades the pigment and one is left which an image formed by the shadow of the objects you placed on the paper.

** Mineral spirits are easily available at the hardware store as they are used for thinning and cleaning up when using oil-based paints.