“If you can do sun printing here in Lancashire, then you can do it anywhere,” quips Lisa Howard. From her studio on the slopes of the Forest of Bowland, she specialises in cyanotype, a printing form that relies on the reaction of ferric acids with sunlight to create blue-and-white prints of the plants in her local area. The results are ethereal and capture a specific moment in time with minimal intervention from the printmaker, bar the selection and arrangement of the plant material itself.
While cyanotype prints and their replicas are currently in vogue, popping up in designs for tea towels and birthday cards, this photographic medium has an important place in the history of botanical illustration. Principally, it was favoured by Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who used the process to, in 1843. Although she dabbled in the modern photography invented by her friend William Henry Fox Talbot, it was cyanotype, developed by her neighbour, Sir John Herschel, that she preferred for her work. A less costly and much more adaptable method, cyanotype allowed her to make hundreds of botanical prints, fine-tuning her technique as she progressed. In the 1850s, she and her friend Anne Dixon published and .
