OPTIMA Fun Palace TV

At least it take away Kirsty. Thank you very much Lewis so hi everyone. Me again. So I’m Dr Kirsty Ross. I’m the outreach off - I’m wearing a different hat now-so right now my hat is as outreach officer for the (bear with me) EPSRC/MRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Optical Medical Imaging, also known as OPTIMA, shared between the University of Edinburgh and the University of Strathclyde. OPTIMA for short and so our CDT is a whole bunch of PhD students who are being trained to have “a heart for science and a head for business”. It’s a 4 year PhD program. They come from lots of different disciplines, you know, we’ve got chemists, engineers, biologists, physicists, we’ve got a vet and a physiotherapist even and they’re all taking the hard sciences and applying them to clinical problems using optical medical imaging. So what I’m going to share with you today is an example of one of our outreach activities that we’d normally do face-to-face. Unfortunately we can’t. So to make sure that as many people get the chance to have a go at this as humanly possible, I’m currently in the process of making up packs to send out to anyone who’s shielding. You don’t need any chemicals. You don’t need any resources.

01:15 - I will send everything out to you so that you can have a go at this yourself at home. Part of the reason for it is because the CDT is all based around light. Blue printing or cyanotype printing is one of the oldest forms of photography. It was originally used in the very first photographic book was actually used to create cyanotype prints of seaweeds so you might want to go and have a go at that. But you can essentially use this for pretty much creating whatever collage you like. We’d love to see some of the pictures.

There’s more details below and in the description 01:48 - of the thumbnails for what hashtag to use. But for now i’m going to turn off this camera switch to another one (going full blue peter today) and I will show you how to do blueprinting okay. So you need these two things. These two things get mixed together and they create the blueprinting liquid. So you take your liquid, you pour it in to your tray like this. Okay you can then use paintbrush, you can use a little foam brush, it’s entirely up to you what you want to use and you simply dunk it into your liquid and you paint it onto your paper.

Now as you can see this is not looking terribly blueprinty right now. That is absolutely fine. Do not panic! It is meant to look like this so you just dab it on just like that. I would recommend do this at night do this under, you know, regular lamp/light bulbs, that sort of thing. Don’t want to do in the daytime. It won’t work. I normally do this about 10 o’clock at night! So you set that to one side to dry and you can do the same sort of thing for fabrics. You just if you want to create your bunting shape like that.

03:11 - The important thing is to let it dry in between. So once you’ve done all that, you set them aside to dry and then very Blue Peter-y, set that also to one side, here are some, here are some I made earlier. So, so it ends up looking kind of like this. So to create your prints you take your paper or your fabric and you take objects. These can be absolutely anything you find in the garden. I seem to have a rather nice little bookmark - pop that on there. I have a rock. If you happen to have any random doilies or any sort of fabrics that’ve got holes in them that’s also fine just stick that over the top as well. That’s essentially it. I’ve managed to steal some of my kids, some of my kids, letters stick that on as well if you want to put your name on it. Make sure you know it’s yours. The other thing you now need to do is… I know it’s Scotland, you may not be in Scotland, you may be somewhere else in the UK. Find a sunny spot. So I did a few experiments this morning and what I did was; I took a piece of fabric and then I left it out for different lengths of time.

04:26 - So that was left out for 20 minutes, that was left out for 15, 10, 9, 8, 7, and what you can see is it gets darker the longer you leave it out. So at the moment with the sun where it is at the moment 10, 15, 20 minutes gives you a nice dark blue and works a lot better. Because, as you can see, if you leave it out for less time the sun has less time to react with the chemicals so you’re left with a different blue at the end of it. So about 10, 20 minutes at the moment is ideal. So you would take this outside, you’d find a nice sheltered spot, and you just leave it in the sun. That’s basically it. So put the piece aside again you then bring your pieces in and this is my bucket of science aka a tray of water.

So I created a couple of pieces of, so 05:21 - this is what they look like when they’ve been sitting out in the sun for a while. They kind of go a sort of a khaki, sort of denim grey when they first come out. This has been sitting around now for a couple of hours so it’s gone slightly dark blue. You put it in water and that’s it. So i’m going to do the (I love this bit, this is my favorite bit) it’s the reveal. So when you pop it in the water, make sure you wear gloves so you can wear a pair of marigolds.

05:46 - And you just pop it in the water and wherever there was a shadow cast by your objects that will start to wash away and what you’ll be left with is the lovely bright white of the paper underneath. Now this one, looks kind of random, kind of abstract, kind of like it, was actually a pile of pumpkin seeds my daughter’s been saving. So that’s what it kind of looks like on paper. You get a lovely dark blue bound to the paper (that’s prussian blue) and then you get the white from the shadows. So i’ll bring that bit closer to let you have a look which is rather cool. Put that to one side. I don’t know what this is going to turn out like.

This was a total experiment so this was me using 06:28 - that sort of lacy doily thing. Let’s see what happens (proper science) ooh cool hope it works. This is science, real science. I’ve got no idea if this is going to work but what you can see. Oh it’s working! Oh that’s so cool! Sorry geeking out a wee bit here. So you just wash it and wash it in the water. This water, these chemicals perfectly safe to go down the sink or down the toilet. Probably better down the toilet and what you’re left with. See if you can see (trying not to drip everywhere) and you’re left with amazing pieces like that. Can you see that? I hope you can see. That’s come out brilliantly! Now obviously because the sun does move, or rather technically speaking the earth moves, it does mean that you will get shadows. So the closer your objects can be to the surface of the paper the better because otherwise they end up a little bit fuzzy.

07:25 - But if anyone’s got any lace, do give it a go and I think you should end up with things like a wee bit like this. And with that I think we’ll return to Lewis in the studio. .