Vacation

Ill be away for the weekend on a camping trip to Baxter State Park in Maine. Very excited! I will not be bake to produce anything new but may have one post later tonight if my exposures are working properly. Then school starts and ill be handling the students so it may be a little before I post again.........

These are the two anthotypes that i exposed earlier yesterday. These were two sheets of beet emulsion with vegetables that were wet and weathered from outside on the paper to exposed. The paper was not dried before set for exposure. This is what gives it more texture. Next week I am going to attempt to create my own emulsion by mixing beets with berries and other vegetables to get a color and texture that is most desirable for me and really narrow down which paper I enjoyed working with the most. I will then set out exposures that will follow this same idea of "wet" exposures. Should be interesting.

Check these images out:

Paper Tests

Ok so I showed you some images this morning of dipping sheets of paper into a beet emulsion and I was testing not having them dry before printing on them. With a slightly overcast day  and about six hours exposure I received these images. Try to capture the texture in them, its really interesting.

Four sheets of paper were dipped, these papers were only dipped once and then a slice of an old potato was laid on them like the picture you saw in this mornings post.

So here we have....

Epson Enhanced Matte

Epson DuraBrite Glossy Photo Paper

Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper

Ilford Galerie Multipurpose Paper

Important to note that these images were not adjusted at all. These are their true colors. It will be interesting to see the difference between the double dipped papers and the ones that are dried and I will expose tomorrow. I will assume they will most likely need more time because the material will not be wet and absorbing the emulsion quicker. 

Results

Look at these.

So I was playing with the levels and curves to emphasize the detail, textures and colors in each Anthotype that is present just not as saturated. Even though I say that they have been "altered" I don't know think that holds completely true. The colors and textures that are on these images are amazing....digitally or not.
here are some examples:
This is a beet emulsion that had a deteriorating kale bunch on top of it and went through a rain storm which made the emulsion pool at the bottom...interesting...

This is a beet emulsion with an onion slice at the top and cucumbers in the middle with c kohlrabi slice at the bottom. Very rice colors. 

This is a red cabbage emulsion with slices of red cabbage on top. The cabbage definitely absorbed some of the emulsion and was left overnight for about two nights and days and this reaction was made in the color. Its absolutely beautiful!

This is a red cabbage with onion strings, egg shells and some leaves on it. 

This is a swiss chard leaf on a swiss chard emulsion and the red stem of the leaf left a mark while exposing which is really intriguing. 

A swiss shard leaf on a fennel emulsion.......

Some weeds on a wine emulsion...

This is a wine emulsion with a house plant leaf on it....both of them are the same. 

Then I started playing with other ideas like coating a paper with grapes and then pressing other berries onto the paper to see what that gave me.... This is what I got. You can see where the blueberries dried up and fell off and some of them stuck with their own juices. This has been out to dry for days and it still is sticky and has juices all over it so I had to scan this on a piece of glass on the flatbed. The juices obviously ran and I think I will do another scan and take the fruit remaining off and see what is underneath. 

This is a red cabbage emulsion with about half a red cabbage left to expose on the paper. This is a dense piece. The colors are amazing and there is little to no correction or saturation here in this image. This is really amazing. I love what happened here. The cabbage absorbed the emulsion through getting wet during condensation process and being left overnight a couple times. Its fascinating that some of the details were able to penetrate through the large bulk of the vegetables onto the paper. I am interested in this.....and the thought of just allowing the produce to "die" on itself and leave a trace is really inviting to me in this process as well. 

I tried the last cucumber print and what it gave me was amazing but I wanted to see if I could keep the leaf flat and so I put the leaf under glass here and then the cucumbers on the glass. There were three in a triangle and you can see their marks where the darker green it. Didnt do what I was hoping but it was still good to try. 

This is three kale leaves that I exposed their own roots on. This was difficult because I couldn't get the roots to lay flat on the leaves. There was too thin roots not directly in contact with the leaf and the sun would just wrap around them. I will try this process again though. You can see in the leaves that the bottom where they all connect there is a darker section and that is where the "stump" of the root rested, The rest of them didn't really keep a trace of the root just exposed a little differently and this is the final product. It is definitely a process to try again and play with it. While doing this I grew a connection with the roots themselves. So I decided to scan them as well. Again its hard to scan something that has so much bulk to it but this is the image I made of it. I am curious now if there may be a connection forming here between the digital world of this work and the life and death of this work. Is there a thought of creating a diptych.... Im not sure.  

Exposing and Scanning

ALright so I have had these vegetables outside for some times now and there is some wear to them.....They are starting to deteriorate naturally and be eating by insects. I liked this. I was interested in coating the paper and exposing it before it was dry like I have previously stated and so I did. Both sheets of paper with coated with a brush and then placed right outside, still wet, and these vegetables and leaves placed on top. What I am trying to get are the marks that these materials will make when they absorb the emulsion into themselves. I was surprised to see the change in the red cabbage when I exposed it and how the mass of half a cabbage took to the paper after going through some weather changes. The colors were extraordinary. This is what I am trying to achieve here, like said in an earlier post, it might just be about color right now too and how do I play and get results that are intriguing. You can see in these images that they are already absorbing the emulsions so we should see what we get!

This bottom image is a set of four different papers that are digital papers that were dipped into a beet emulsion. I again curious on how the material absorbs the emulsion when it is not dry before exposing. This is a potato that had passed its time and I started to think about the waste of the fruits and veggies that some people may have....or even that I have. How much do I throw out or allow to waste/rot in my fridge because I didnt find the time to prepare them or eat them? This idea also coincides with life and death as well. Like rotten milk? How does curdled cream look on a surface such as this and how will it react to  the materials? So Im think I may play with this idea slightly..... See what comes of it. I also have two other sets of these sheets of paper, one is going to be double dipped and the other once and both dried before exposing. I will post later because I spent all morning scanning about ten anthotypes I produced the other day and am SUPER excited to bring them into the good old Photoshop and see what comes of them. Stay tuned.