That's Lucky

Yesterday I picked a few hedgerow plants to use for cyanotype images.  A dandelion clock, buttercups, ground elder, grasses, cow parsley.  The more delicate and intricate the plant, the more interesting the result.  Solid leaves or flowers render a solid white image.  I don’t like to pick many plants.  Repeating the technique with the same few samples, to practice placement, is the best way to learn.     

It’s a fascinating process.  Images tend to look very flat, so composition is important, especially using the dry method – the chemical is dry on the paper prior to exposing the image.  The wet method, the chemical painted on and used while still wet, messy but more fun.  The whole process is time constrained for exposure to the sun’s rays. 

Like watercolour paint, wet cyanotype chemicals can have substances added to create textures and subtle colours.   Salt, bleach, soap suds, even turmeric.  Depth can be achieved by layering strips of material, like lace.  Pressed seaweeds work well.  Autumnal leaves with holes and decayed edges, and seed pods all make interesting shapes.  

Spent an hour or so in the sunny morning and made thirty images.  After lunch, went the Virginia Woolf walk – to the lighthouse.  The day had changed and had become irritatingly blustery.  Weirdly, the surface of the sea only rippled in small wavelets.  Wind and waves didn’t match, Beaufort-wise.  Maybe they had a tiff.  Fell out during the thunder storm.  Something had stirred up the seabed, the sand suspended, refusing to sink, waves seething beneath.  It seemed there was more bluster underwater than emerged on the surface.  Tormenting breeze whipped the rigging on the moored yachts, making them whelp like huskies desperate for someone to call ‘Mush!’      

A seagull shit and it splattered off a wall onto my new Seasalt sweater. 

Apparently, that’s lucky.