Introducing Blythtypes

Positive-working Cyanotype prints!

This website describes a new Cyanotype system, the ‘Blythtype’, which offers a new technique resulting in a positive image made from a positive image. Another advantage of this new technique is the increase in light sensitivity through the introduction of a photosensitive dye. Crucially, it also offers photosensitivity to the red end of the spectrum enabling a greater balance of grey scales to be recorded from coloured images which until now has not been directly possible with Cyanotypes. The authors hope this will excite many home based Cyanotype experimenters to have a go. Some chemical mechanics of how this new system is thought to work is given at the end.

This new ‘positive-working Cyanotype system’ has three great advantages.

1. It does not need a negative image sheet.
2. It allows a modern digital projector to be used, as one might a photographic enlarger.
3. It allows old transparencies like ‘Kodachromes’ to be turned directly into cyanotype images using old analogue projectors.
   

All chemicals and equipment are readily available at low cost from Internet suppliers. Without exception the chemicals advocated are not acutely toxic, nevertheless safety precautions should always be taken to keep chemicals away from children.

Blyth, J. & Richardson, M. De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

Non-holographic imaging systems