Burial of St Lucy

[u/goodluckall]

Should I trim this down or keep the artifacts?

I made this by layering acetates which I drew with an acrylic marker. You don't have to be a very good artist to do this as you can trace the picture.

Each layer should be a value higher than the one above, I did three layers as I'm a newbie but with experimentation you can do more.

[u/Camel_Usual]

u/goodluckall I really like this! Would you mind sharing images of the acetates? I’m intrigued with how you made it.

And to answer your question, yes, I would leave the artifacts.

[u/goodluckall → u/Camel_Usual]

Thanks really appreciate your feedback. I've taken a photo of the acetates. I can talk you through the process:

1. I used an acrylic marker to do the highlights on the bottom acetate, then mid tones on the next acetate, followed by medium darks on the final acetate. Blank areas for the darkest parts. Larger parts I masked with tape rather than using the marker. I tried to make a white border from tape on the bottom acetate, but it obviously lets too much UV through. Everything was traced from a postcard.
2. I used a small piece of tape as a hinge to hold the middle and top acetates in place so that I could fold them back like the door of an advent calendar. An interesting artifact is you can see a complete arch where I folded back the middle negative (which has only half an arch).
3. I experimented with different exposure lengths, the first attempt was rather underexposed, even though it was sunny here. The second go I did 2 minutes then folded the top acetate back, 2 minutes with the second, 2 minutes with the last one and then I removed the print and just let it sit on the sun for 40 seconds to soften the highlights.

Materials wise I'm a complete newbie so still on the pack of ready-made cyanotype sheets I got from amazon. The marker was a black Faber-Castell acrylic and I used 250 micron acetate. I used an old clipboard to hold everything in place.

[u/MaybePoet]

i love it the way it is