Day 3: paper...?

*note: this was supposed to be posted yesterday, but my scanner was being lame, and i got pissed. plus, a walk and a nap with my dude got in the way, so day 3 was posted today, technically, day 4. day 4 will be posted later, after my dude and i take our walk (that will make sense later).

So my task for the day was to "make something out of paper, but don't use scissors, glue, or draw on it". So my first thought was to do tear art (made a whole 'book' once back in 10th grade, so i'd say i'm an old pro at it), but then in brain storming a tear art piece, it hit me-SUN PRINT! DUH!

A sun print is made with light sensitive paper being placed in the sun. with objects on top of the paper, the negative image emerges as a print, after paper is rinsed under water for 1 min. it's a pretty cool process, and i had been meaning to get back into darkroom photo techniques for a really long time (i have a darkroom supplies sitting in boxes waiting for room).

So i had bought a kit a while ago from art supply warehouse (best place ever if you live in orange county, ca), and it was probably the last good, hot, sunny day in CA till winter really kicks in, so i decided to make some sun prints:

So there's all 3 :)

this is the first one i did:

It's rose bush leaves and this other bush's tiny leaves. the tiny leaves didn't come out so hot, and i thought the rose bush leaves we're just big splotches.

The next one i did:

this one if a bunch of different leaves and some flowers. the pink flower (bottom left) was fairly see through, that's why its got a light blue shape and not white. and the twigs i found seemed to be too thin (like the tiny leaves from the first print), so i needed to try something else.

when i was taking a black and white photo class in college, one of the first assignments was a 'photogram' (basically a sun print, but you use a darkroom and enlarger, not the sun and water), so i had some ideas from when i did it back then. i remembered my jelly bracelets and ipod headphones made fun shapes/lines on the print. So i went in my room to see what i could find and came up with some head phones, a faux pearl necklace:

what was pretty cool was that the sun was setting, so the shadows stretched a little, creating bigger pearls and giving this cool depth to the print. the whitest, whites are where no sun hit the paper, so the gradient the setting sun's shadows made looked really cool.

i'm actually really proud of myself for having included photography in today's challenge :)