pictures, chemicals, aprons, and italia!! :)

Ok, people. I put some of my pictures of my apartment and the surrounding area on my facebook account. And somehow, they gave me a web address where everyone can view them, even if you don't have a facebook account. So that is my new plan on how to share pictures. I am going to work on getting the last chunk of them on there soon, but they will probably go up backwards, so just work with me. My portable hard drive still isn't working on the computer, so my professor said he would help me figure it out tomorrow, and if that doesn't work, I am going to go to an internet cafe and take them off my hard drive and put them on facebook, then I will put captions on them when I get back to campus. Here is the link-- check it out!

http://gsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2089249&l=9cd76&id=22605407


My class is wonderful-- I love it! We are doing stuff with cyanotype. What we did is we mixed chemicals with water into two different solutions. Then we mixed the two together in small doses, and paint them onto a piece of paper. When the two chemicals mix, they are light sensitive, so they have to dry in a dark room overnight. Then the next day, we gathered all sorts of stuff, mostly pictures that we got on the computer or made copies of drawings and stuff, and made them all black and white. It has nothing to do with colored pictures- it is all about being transparent or opaque. Then we coat the paper with the picture with baby oil to make the white more transparent. We then lay our paper with the cyanotype chemicals on a piece of foam and put our transparent/opaque pictures on top of them and lay glass on top of that, and let them sit in the sun for anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes, depending on the time of day, amount of sunlight, etc. And that exposes the pictures, which makes the black lines from the picture white and the white areas blue on the paper that had the cyanotype chemicals. From there, we can dip the paper in hydrogen peroxide, which makes the blue a really rich pretty blue, or we can dip them in ammonia, which depending on how long you leave it in there, will turn it a variety of different colors. We also have another chemical we can paint on top to make a plum kind of color. The whole process is really cool, and it's been so much fun to experiment and see what happens when you try different things. And a big plus, I get to wear a sweet apron! Me and my roommate and two other girls in our group went and bought Italy ones from a street vendor. Mine is yellow and has olive oil on it. :)

After I finish updating this, I am going to photoshop a bunch of the pictures I took today to make them black and white and get them printed and ready to expose tomorrow. I don't have class til 2 tomorrow, so my roommate Andrea and I are going to a cemetery really early in the morning to take pictures and stuff. I'm super excited about it! I love cyanotype!! I'm off to work, many hours after class is over and into the night, because it's fun! Woo Italy! It makes everything so much more exciting!! Miss all of you guys! Leave comments on my pictures! Arrivederci!