Several people used hibiscus flowers and the conditions and timing were perfect to show off the translucency.
Aside from the paper prints we do little drawstring bags, those ended up neat today as well. Sometimes it’s trickier to get a good exposure on them.
Damn that’s cool, those turned out great!
Could you share a little more for those of us who don’t know what this is?
Hell yeah! It’s an alternative photography process. You mix up a chemical emulsion and paint it on some watercolor paper (or fabric or wood or anything porous). Then you can arrange a composition on the paper with stuff like plants (what we focus on for this class) but other stuff like have or loose knit fabrics, objects with neat shapes, whatever. You can also take photos or do digital design and print out negatives on transparencies.
Once you’re ready to go, you expose them in the sun! There’s a lot of different factors in how long you expose them for–time of day, time of year, cloud cover, the thickness of your design materials, the pH of your paper or fabric, and a bunch of other stuff I know I haven’t learned about yet. In my class we watch everyone’s prints and I explain the different phases you can see them go through. I talk about what changes I’m looking for and factors I’m considering. I’ll tell each person when I think theirs is done and what has led me to that decision. It gets easier with practice, but I always tell people it’s a great art form for “recovering perfectionists” because I’m always learning something new.
Once they’re exposed, you just rinse in a plain water bath and you get that awesome blue. This was about 20 minutes after rinsing, but they continue to get deeper in color over the next day or so as the pigments oxidize.