birds nest cyanotype prints

every artist is a bit of a magpie

Hello there! It's Jocelyn Mathewes from my studio in Appalachia. And I found two bird's nests this past week.

Like many others I'm a magpie for things like that. Interesting rocks, tiny trinkets, family memorabilia; I gather them into little altars around my studio.

I’m running out of room on this shelf, but it won’t stop me!

I even have a special area for my three children's trinkets—

This vignette is more poignant the older they get.

I set the two nests beside my workstation. Somehow the presence of all these interesting objects helps to create an environment full of memory and mystery and vibrational energy. Their presence fuels my art.

Don’t mind all the sticks and junk.

behind the scenes

The bird nests sparked something in me; I felt the need to photograph the nests and try printing them in cyanotype. This would mean creating a digital negative.

Creating a digital negative is its own art; not all inkjet printers are suited to the task, and the best negatives make use of all the ink colors to provide a density that makes for the best print possible.

Smaller print tests to test negative density and exposure time.

My quick and dirty negative tests were made with black-only ink, just to get a gauge for if the idea was worthwhile or not. I'm not going to spend hours tweaking a negative if the end result isn't fascinating in some way.

Initial test prints after the “quick and dirty.”

Looking through the resulting prints, I felt the old reflex of manipulating them further, so I gave myself permission to let it rip on a few of the junky ones—