Cyanotype is an old fashioned way to make photographs. All you need to make an image is light and water. Since we don’t have UV
light boxes at home, we can use the sun! We paint regular paper (or fabric) with a photo-sensitive chemical in order to make it photographic.
By exposing the paper to UV light, the green chemical develops on the paper, turning blue. When the time is up we rinse away any green chemical
that wasn’t exposed to the sun and we are left with blue and white - a cyanotype.
The word photo- means light. Think photons or photosynthesis. So photo-sensitive means something is sensitive to light.
The word cyan means blue. This process is called cyanotype because the images are always blue!
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Engineers used the cyanotype process into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as “blueprints.”
A photogram is another term for an image made by placing objects directly onto the surface of the cyanotype paper, which is what you’ll be doing at home.
The process uses two different chemicals that are mixed in equal parts and then painted onto the paper, referred to as Part A and Part B.
UV (or Ultraviolet) light is the type of radiation that makes black-light posters glow, and is responsible for summer tans — and sunburns. Sunshine is UV light.