https://leecetheartist.dreamwidth.org/586201.html#cutid1

Too many photos to wrangle for me tonight twice over, so if you'd like to see some wildflowers, interesting West Australian vegetation and the perils of walking in the banksia heath, click on the link.

@klepsydra
Oh, I don't know. What sort of horse? What colouration? Mane wild or groomed? Bows in his mane, for example? Piercings? Unexpected cranial growths? No, wait, that's something else. Oooh! Skull implants? Are his eyes equine or human?

#MerMay #MerMay2025 #NoAI #DrawingWithoutANet

A simple one today drawn with the LAMY ABC student pen and some water brush.

All franchises are created equal. But some are more equal than others.

#StarWars #MayThe4th #MayThe4thBeWithYou #SciFi #stories

Včera jsem sundal plechovky ze střechy. Na to, že jsou to první pokusy si myslím, že dobrý. U příštích musím dát dírku o něco výše a asi ji ještě zmenším. Až přestane pršet, půjsou na střechu nové.
#solarografie #solarigraphy

None of the sunsets or flowers I saw this week was as lovely as these ugly patches of tarmac. This is the old Aarhus County Hospital. The council is developing it into a mixed-use neighbourhood. While excavating, they discovered that 2 huge emergency generators in bomb-shelter operation rooms still work perfectly. So they dug them up, threw tarmac in the hole and donated them to Ukraine. Now they ensure electricity in a hospital in Odessa that had been plagued by power cuts.

#Aarhus
#Ukraine

@SFFMagazineCovers
The Queen of the Depths summoned a new glyph into the waters."Well Gromm? What of this one?" she imperiously demanded.
Her chief servitor considered the image floating in front of him. "The stressing is effective, but the top curve is a little short for the size of the serif."

The seadragon merely snorted. What would bipeds know of such things? They have not even considered the possibilities of hand-writing imitative typography. He could see the day, far in the future where one such typeface would dominate.

#SF #SFF #microfiction #tootfic #IAmWriting #comicsans

@michaelgemar @SFFMagazineCovers

Your mind works like mine does!

I'm glad both Canada and Australia have managed to push back against their own fascist bozos. Maybe the US turning into a dumpster fire has some benefit.

#capol #auspol #uspol

Just a lil guy stuck in the shallows

#OC #Azra #MerAzra #Mermay #Mermaid

@rdm well, nobody seems to be, which is a shame! I just recently found it in an old german photography book which seems to be the only source that ever mentioned it.

It's very similar to cyanotype, using a sensitizer made up of ferric chloride, ferric sulfate and tartaric acid which gets coated onto paper and exposed. Afterwards it gets developed in a solution of gallic acid. Where it was exposed it forms soluble ferrogallate and in the unexposed areas it forms insoluble dark grayish/purple ferrigallate. Basically iron gall ink! This makes it the only easy to DIY positive black and white process I know of.

I've done a bunch of tests with it recently and found it to work very well! My current iteration of new cyanotype sensitizers are based on this ferric chloride + ferric sulfate + dicarboxylic acid formula. I have a bunch of posts about my ink print experiments on my profile but once I understand it better I'm gonna write up a proper blog post about it

@rdm also, if you wanna try it yourself, here is the formula for 300ml of sensitizer, derived from the recipe in the book:

• 10g of ferric sulfate
• 20ml of 25% ferric chloride
• 10g of tartaric acid
• distilled water to make 300ml

The book also adds 10g of gelatin, but I'm not a big fan of dead stuff so I didn't do that. Might also work with some other sizing agents though like arrowroot or gum arabic.

To make one liter of developer:

• 4g of gallic acid
• 0.5-1g of oxalic acid
• 1L of water

Coat the sensitizer onto paper, let it dry, expose like a normal cyanotype, then dunk into the developer till it's fully developed and no yellow remains. This takes a few minutes. The developer can be reused quite a few times

Thanks so much Antony Green for all the election calls and keeping it going even when the technology fails you.

You are an example to us all and we Australians salute you

(and now we face a desolate future of elections being called by someone other than you.)

#auspol #AusVotes

@slyka
I'm not familiar with that one. Please, fill me in!

@rdm Ohh really cool! I've mostly been using agar coated glass plates which work really well and give super clean and sharp results, but I'm also looking into way to coat agar onto different kinds of plastic film.
My goal is to make some kind of bioplastic based vegan cyanotype film, but it's really hard to find a substrate that the agar adheres to well enough. It sticks super well to glass, but not much else unfortunately. I'd love to try cellulose triacetate, but it's really hard to find…

But turning it into film would allow me to shoot it in my medium format camera which I have much faster lenses for.

I've also been working on recreating the "ink print" process, which is similar to cyanotype but gives a positive black and white image, but I haven't tried that in camera yet

@rdm impressive! The ferricyanide absorbs an incredible amount of light when added during exposure, cutting down sensitivity by like two or three stops. I wrote a whole article on it if you're interested https://slyka.net/blog/2023/cyanotype-developer-absorption/

Also, do you do them on paper or on glass?

Sorry for being really excited I don't meet many other people doing in camera cyanotype!

@slyka
No problem at all! There are not many of us!

I expose onto paper, but it have experimented with using gloss inkjet film as a substrate, with mixed success.

@slyka
Exposing the mixed chemistry, and yes, ferric citrate and ferricyanide.