In Sunshine and Shadow
2023
Cyanotype on fabric
10” x 7”
In Sunshine and Shadow, is depicting a scene called Komorebi (木漏れ日) in Japanese. It has no simple English translation exists, but Komorebi roughly translates as “the scattered light that filters through when sunlight shines through trees”. I used to play a game of stepping on those scattered shadow filters through the sunlight because they are good hide-and-seek players in the moment of ephemeral but perpetual. Now, I found komorebi very peaceful and I wanted to recreate the scene as how it naturally happened by the sun; therefore, I used cyanotype, a photographic printing process using sunlight to produce blueprints.
This was my first time creating a cyanotype piece. In order to print the object (my photogram), I needed to create a negative in contact with my coated fabric by the following steps which are shown in the above pictures:
1. Sketched my reference
2. Turned it into a high-contrast drawing by editing it in Photoshop
3. Inverted the whole image and printed it on a transparent film
After preparing my photogram, here are the last few steps:
4. Expose my cyanotype(object) to the sun
5. Remove my object and wash it in cold running water
6. Allow to dry
There was a lot of trial and error during my first cyanotype project, but I found this process very peaceful and joyful.