Toning cyanotype print with black tea
Many of the cyanotype prints I make always start the same way, searching and searching for an image, illustration, photograph or drawing that I like and that catches my eye on something.
In this case, I found this painting of a landscape that I really liked. When I find the right image I edit it in photoshop to turn it into a negative and then print it.
The moment I notice that the negative is well printed and can be a nice cyanotype print, I take a sheet from my cyanotype kit and proceed to create the cyanotype.
When I was making this print, I thought that it could be very nice to make a color toning, since sometimes I get a little tired of blue. As I had never tried to make color shifts with black tea, and I wanted to experiment, I started to do it.
This is the result after making my edits on the photograph. This is the negative, which I then print on a transparent plastic sheet in order to make the cyanotype prints.
In this image you can see the first result, a cyanotype, blue as usual, exposed to the ultraviolet light of my lamp for three minutes.
The result is quite good and in this case I liked it that way, just with the blue color, so I made another one in order to keep the two versions, the blue one and the one that was going to be toned.
This is the final result, and being the first time I use black tea, I can say that it has just become my favorite color shade for cyanotypes. You get a reddish tone and also a sepia tone, which gives an old photographic look, which can be very interesting for some images.
As I almost always use very old images of works of art, this sepia look matches very well.
Finally, this is the comparative result.
The first print is cyanotype without any color shading. The second one is bleached and colored with black tea and the third one colored with soluble coffee.
I hope you liked it and that it encourages you to make your own color shifts to your cyanotype prints.