Feather Cyanotypes, Part Two

Last week I showed you the cyanotypes I made that were inspired by some feather studies I've done over the last three years. Today, I'll show you how I incorporated those studies into my photograms.

I'd already tried painting and drawing on cyanotypes, and liked the combination of early photography with drawing inspired by natural history illustration. For these newest cyanotpyes, I recreated my old studies onto the prints. I started by painting the shape of the feather I wanted to draw with gesso. Once that had dried, I used acrylic paint to add color and value. I finished off each feather by adding details with a micronpen.




For these first two, I drew directly into the silhouettes made by the feathers I had used to make the cyanotypes, blurring the distinction between photogram and illustration. I didn't use gesso for this group, as I was able to work directly on the exposed paper.


As I progressed through the prints, I ventured from filling in outlines to drawing new feathers next to the photograms, expanding and enhancing the original patterns I'd made.



Finally, for the last two, I more freely intermingled the feathers with the photograms by overlapping them, making the feathers look as though they had fallen on to the cyanotypes. For the last one in particular I also added two gesso silhouettes for balance. I was originally going to fill them in, but ultimately decided not to do so. For the last one in particular, I used more desheveled, emotive feather drawings as inspiration, giving the prints a freer look to them. The drawings are no longer confined to the outlines and patterns of the cyanotypes, but instead float across the page seemingly at will.




As with so many of my projects, this undertaking is informed by art history. The cyanotype itself is often emblematic of 19th-century science and natural history, while the feather drawings I made were definitely channeling illustrative traditions. There's also a bit of trompe l'oeil at play here, with my drawings playfully interacting with the spaces and voids created by the photograms. Collectively I suppose the series conveys a few different meanings. Perhaps it's an homage of freedom and the relinquishment of confinements. Or maybe it's an exploration of the natural devolution of order into chaos, with the feathers becoming increasingly disarrayed as they break out of the patterns I had originally created. Perhaps it's both.

The great thing about this project is that I can always expand it. If I were to continue this particular series, I'd further explore the interaction between the photograms and the drawings by reversing the overlapping, making it appear that the photograms are now lying on top of the drawings. It's also the sort of project I can continue wherever I'm living, becoming an informal record of the types of wildlife I interact with during my lived experiences. Either way, I'd like to make more in the future, as they've taken me to interesting places so far.

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