How can such a simple process be so hard?  As I said in my first post, this is something I first learned in 7th grade.  So I was what, 12?  13?  Anyways still just a kid.  If a kid can do this, it can't be that hard, can it?  The answer apparently, is yes.  It seems so wildly inconsistent which in part may be due to conditions.  It's winter, my little studio is in the coldest room in the house, and my darkroom is only UV safe at night...  The former upstairs kitchen.  And there's no way to make it dark during the day.  So I only have a few hours in the evenings to work on this, it's cold, it's overly dry, running back and forth - brush on the emulsion in one room, move it to another (warmer) room to dry, 30 minutes later, back to the first room to expose, then off to the third room to process and wash.  That's good for maybe three prints a night at best, and since the conditions always change, there's no consistency in the process.

All Saints Chapel, Elkhart Lake, WI   From a 4x5 film negative.  The surprise to me here was the amount of extra exposure this required over the print I did the other day using another process (more on that later)

Negative choice has proven to be an issue as well.  In other words, I don't know what a good negative for Cyanotype looks like yet.

While this one has some other issues, it certainly does not appear to be a good negative for Cyanotype.  To see anything at all, I had to cut exposure to 2 minutes, therefore the whole thing looks washed out.  No good "blacks" and no good "whites" at all.

On the other side of the coin, the digital negative thing has not been going well at all.  Everyone says that the Epson printers are the only ones that can do digital negatives.  Here's the problem...  I have two dead Epson printers awaiting their final trip to the city dump, and neither my wife nor I have any interest in spending a lot of money on a printer that doesn't appear to have a very good track record.  But the cheap Canon office do everything printer we do have is definitely not up to the task.  The inks don't block UV very well, so I'm trying to work through a process where you add a specific color to assist with the UV blocking.  However, I had a major meltdown today when trying to follow step by step instructions, and nothing was working as it did on the video.  I still can't make it work correctly, and therefore I.m feeling like I must be the dumbest person in the world.

First solid attempt from a digital negative at 5x7.  I could live with this, but I still think it could be better, so of course, I'll try again.

There was a bit of light at the end of the tunnel when, in a fit of something, I just decided to try something and see what might happen.  "It either works or it doesn't" just had to be my attitude for the evening.  Well, the result isn't as terrible as I was sure it was going to be.  There is potential here, I just have to figure out how to achieve it.  I can't wait however until Canon gets their large format printers back in stock...  Anywhere!