I truly thought I was done making wet cyanotypes for the season, but the weather in early November in PA stayed very warm, almost balmy, and I had the opportunity to do one more round so I took it. I collected fallen leaves and twigs on a woodsy walk, including these tulip poplar leaves above.
The leaves below are making me crazy because I am not certain about their ID. I am tentatively calling them sour gum, Nyssa sylvatica, because the shape, size and habitat match up. Most online photos show them with red fall foliage, but I'm also seeing some with this shade of yellow. Ideas and commentary are welcome!
This one I know. It's hard to mistake a sycamore leaf.
And the same applies to a sassafras. This is a double mitten leaf; single mitten leaves and plain ovals are all present on the same tree.
Back in my yard, I finished my foraging with a painted fern and a fading hosta leaf. All of these were exposed on cotton sateen that I treated with cyanotype chemicals. I sprayed them with very diluted washing soda around the edges, and plain water over all, covered them with glass, and put them out in the bright autumn afternoon sun.
I brought them in overnight because there was a threat of rain, and put them back out the next morning. The threat became a drizzle, then a slow steady rain under cloudy skies. I had some success with leaving prints out in summer showers, but here it was obvious autumn had finally arrived and this exposure was going nowhere. I brought them in again, removed the glass and leaves, and set them to dry off in the dark before rinsing.
Here are the dry, un-rinsed prints. Lots of depth of color, and very little of the bright, colored breakdown I was getting on hot midsummer days.
I really love recording them at this stage.
And here are the finished prints. Again, very different from the hot summer prints, but equally gorgeous in their own way. They are a bit more reminiscent of a regular, short exposure dry cyanotype print, but with some mottling in the background, and a lot of interesting, subtle patterns and colors in the masked areas.
Really beautiful, right?
I always have more ideas than I have time, but I think these four fall leaf prints could be the basis for a solid art quilt. I just need to ID those presumed gum leaves for certain.....
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