3:56 "The red colour told me that it was highly acidic, which made sense considering it was a solution of citric acid" hmmm yes the acid here is made of acid
The absurdity was perfect. It forced me to remember it later to be surprised when he added the alkaline iron hydroxide to the neutral ammonium citrate and the pH dropped to three!
For some reason the part where you mixed up a citric acid solution and tested the ph was so fucking funny to me. "Yep, the red color means it's highly acidic, which makes sense because it's a solution of citric acid"
My dad is an art teacher who specializes in photography. I remember making cyanotypes as a kid OFTEN and he’s even built a darn room in our barn. He does all this science in there and it’s always seemed like magic tricks. It’s so cool to see the science behind it and learn the numbers
theoretically, you could also use sunscreen to draw instead of sharpie because it's designed to cover up UV light. I think it would result in some interesting drawings given the liquidy and natural nature of it
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't H2O2 used for stabilising the blue colour of CrO5 instead of Prussian blue? If not, could you plz explain the chemical reasoning for the same?
Blueprints were still going strong back in the 80's when I worked in a design office. Certainly back then it was difficult to photocopy the A1 and A0 sized paper that much of their design work was done on, so the semi-transparent originals were fed through a semi-automatic blueprint machine which did the UV exposure and curing for you. I still remember the reek of Ammonia in that office!
The Nile Red flower print you made would look amazing as a t-shirt. Literally, pause at 13:36 and everything on the white background. Something to think about.
I LIVE for your videos!! As a chemist myself, I really like the way you show RAW lab experiments, especially when something doesn’t work and you explain why! Also, your videos are almost ASMR and I can’t get enough of it! Keep up with the good work!!!
11:38 - "Uh-oh, he missed a spot." 12:34 - "Surely now he will notice." 12:47 - "...bedamned." In 5th grade, they gave us each a stack of blue UV-sensitive paper, and we had a section of the classroom set up as a makeshift darkroom, with a dim red light, trays of various things (water, some fixatives or other, heck if I remember anymore), a string with clothespins on it... It was hell of fun, and we felt like we were Serious Artists, although how many silhouettes of leaves and outlines of hands does one classroom really NEED, eh?
This was really cool to see. My father used to circuit diagrams with cyanotype to both verify the transparency blocks enough UV to produce a good circuit board as well as to create the circuit diagram that would be included with the board (usually slide into a clear plastic sleeve inside the casing of whatever the board went into. I was very young at the time, around 8 years old and have wondered ever since how he managed to produce the beautiful blue diagrams using the same transparency that was used for the board. This video really brought back some memories. A nice addendum to this technique is that you can print onto the transparencies using an inkjet printer if you set the printer to gray scale and ramp up the print quality (note that some printers cheat on gray scale and mix in color to reduce black ink usage).
As a final step in the cyanotype process, I have always used a finishing bath. The blue color of the print will fully develop over the next week or so, but if you want it done immediately, add approximately 10 mils of 3% hydrogen peroxide to 500 mils of distilled water. Put this solution in a second tray and give the print a dip before you hang it to dry. The color will instantly darken and become richer.
That's the way very, very old blueprints were made. I'm an Olde-Timey Civil Engineer, and the blueprints we made were the opposite of what was shown. The background remained white, while the drafted work was dark. We would use blacks pens and pencils for drafting, and LeRoy lettering stencils for notes. For construction lines, we would use blue pencils (as they would not show up on the print), while red pencils were used for lighter lines, such as dimension extension lines. Ammonia was used to cure the print, and I remember many a day spent in a poorly ventilated print room running drawings. This was circa 1985 until about 2002.
I was really looking forward to this. It's impressive that you made the type that could be developed in water, just like the kits I played with as a kid. I would have figured a homebrew would have involved a separate development chemical to be added later.
Fifty years ago, I had a summer job that involved blueprints. I worked next to a huge machine that made prints that were six feet wide. A big tank of anhydrous ammonia fed into the machine, and the guy who operated the machine told me that the ammonia fumes "developed" the prints. And all the blueprints I handled (not just from the big machine) smelled of ammonia. What does this have to do with the process you just demonstrated?
It looked very much the same, including how the white parts were pale greenish-yellow until everything was developed. But, as I said, that was fifty years ago...
That is Diazo print, also known as Diazotype, Dyline print, Whiteprint and blueline print. It was a lot cheaper and easier than the cyanotype/blueprint process but unlike cyanotype the prints have limited durability and will fade if exposed to light for a few weeks. Wikipedia has a good description of the process under 'Whiteprint'.
I'd like to throw this one in there, but in most cases you could use a silicone baking tray and flex it to separate the desiccated product instead of painstakingly scraping the vessels! Hope this helps you!
I followed the procedure and everything looked exactly what you got, however when I mixed the solutions of the ferric ammonium citrate and the potassium ferricyanide I got lots of prussian blue, i have worked in low light far from UV lights so I don't know what is going on. Edit:How to solve this below Update: I finally fixed the problem, well it was obvious that I was getting some iron (II) contamination but i didn't knew were it came from but after some experimenting I found the cause to be my bad quality ferric chloride, it was contaminated with lots of iron (II) plus while it was supposed to be 20% was actually a 32% solution so I ended up with a large excess of uncomplexed iron (II). To avoid this problem in the first place I would recommend to add some hydrogen peroxide to your iron hydroxide to be sure its fully oxidized, It should look reddish not black as in the video. In case your Ferric ammonium citrate ends up like mine it can be fixed easily by adding some hydrogen peroxide drop wise until it becomes slightly brown, then add drop wise a saturated solution of ammonium citrate and mix until it becomes slightly green, let it rest for a few minutes and test the solution, if it keeps turning blue when mixed with the potassium ferricyanide add more Ammonium citrate solution, keep doing this until you no longer get the blue color. Also I made Ferric ammonium oxalate and its much easier to make plus is far more sensitive to light than the citrate, the only problem is that it leaves a rusty tinge on paper so not ideal for cyanotype but amazing for ferric gelatin (holography) experiments.
How does one get in touch here? Thanks for that info. For the last few weeks I've been working on this and using different sources of iron, with mixed results. Don't know enough to be able to figure things out myself. I have currently a batch (made from purchased iron filings) that is red. I also bubbled air through it for a few days before adding H2O2. I believe that Mike Ware's new cyanotype formula uses ferric ammonium oxalate; how did you make it?
@@sizzlenotsteak To make the ferric ammonium oxalate, prepare iron hydroxide in the same way as when you make it for the ferric ammonium citrate, then once you have your iron hydroxide add a saturated solution of oxalic acid, i recommend to do this on a hot plate, I made it around 80C° but shouldn't matter the temperature, add the solution until all the iron hydroxide dissolves and the solution becomes acidic then let it cool, it should look yellow-green wit no precipitate, if you have precipitate filter it because that is likely ferrous oxalate so not good, we need ferric oxalate which is soluble and in oxidation state III. Prepare a saturated ammonium oxalate solution and add it to the ferric oxalate solution you prepared earlier, it will become brilliant green, that's the ferric ammonium oxalate. I didn't used any stochiometry when i made mine, it was just a quick test to see if it worked so i just added an excess of ammonium oxalate, you can add a few drops of H2O2 at this point just to be sure its fully oxidized to iron III, just a little H2O2 there is no need to add too much. To remove most of the excess ammonium oxalate I boiled down the solution until the excess ammonium oxalate started precipitating, filtered it and then put it on the fridge to cool to crystallize as much ammonium oxalate as possible and filtered it again. Its hard to crystallize the ferric ammonium oxalate its very soluble but you can let the solution fully evaporate so it crystallizes as emerald color crystals, it will have a lot of the ammonium oxalate though but seems still works good enough for cyanotypes and ferric gelatin (if you are into holography). It seems that ferric potassium oxalate might be easier to make because it has lower solubility therefore much easier to purify by crystallization, i haven't tried it yet but if i do i post results here. Just some notes I might add, the ferric oxalate and the ferric ammonium oxalate are more light sensitive than the citrate so try working far from daylight or anything with too much blue or UV light, the drops of H2O2 added in one of the steps help to convert back any photoreduced iron so it should be ok to work under good ilumination, like warm LED lights or incandescent. Good luck!
this is so fun! i remember doing something like this in my high school chemistry class, but with tshirts! we soaked the shirts in the solution and brought in designs that the teacher had printed for us on clear plastic, and it worked much the same way! it was a very cool and an unforgettable project
Hey Nile, could you try making something out of an alloy that's 50% iron, 25% vanadium and 25% cobalt? It would be nice to actually see someone make CoVFeFe.
This is prob my fav of yours. Really really cool! Love to see the pics when you upload next. I always wondered how blueprints were made. I am a musician and many older parts for musicals were printed (developed) this way I believe. The music was the same blue color on a white background. The paper was always very heavy
This is actually surprisingly similar to a way older form of blueprint used in fabrics. Essentially it is a method in which you first use wooden printing blocks to transfer a colour-resistant substance onto the fabric (a variety of substances were used and the specific recipe tends to be a secret specific to the printer). In the next step the fabric got coloured with indigo and finally the colour-resistant substance got removed from the fabric using diluted sulphuric acid. There are still some few printers who use this method and in much of central Europe it is considered part of the immaterial cultural heritage
The blue print stile was often used up to at least the early 90's for working copies of large drawings. It was a lot faster and cheaper to use then printer and plotters. The orignal was plottet on a large semi transparent plastic sheet and when you needed a copy it was put into a blue-printer that made an one-to-one A1 or larger copy in a minutt or so.
There are so many other, non-silver processes out there. Getting the chemicals is all you need. Many of the silver processes easily react to light, while some of the non-silver (such as a number of the dichromate salts) tend to require significant exposure to light or near UV.
I've done a few years ago an internship for an aerospace subcontractor and the design department still printed their design on transparency for archiving. I guess it's a remnant from the old blueprint process! It's also quite convenient because you can quickly compare 2 revisions of the same part by overlaying the drawings.
Awesome video. I really like the way the final cyanotype looks. You could get some cool looking images from using plants and leaf skeletons. Thanks for sharing this.
I found this interesting because I used to work at a microfiche service bureau and the duplicates of the original silver-halide film was copied on to 105mm diazo film (exposed with with UV light and then developed with a little anhydrous ammonia).
History, chemistry, physics and home science all bundled into witty, fun to watch videos. Thanks for the awesome videos and boooooo too those who report such channels that educate rather than report the prank channels.
such an interesting video! I used to work for an engineering firm and I came across a lot of old blueprints when I sorted through the archives so it's pretty neat to learn how they were actually processed
For evaporation water and solidifying stuff, why don't you line the dish with cling film? When it is fully evaporated, I imagine it'll be much simpler to take the cling film away than to evaporate it on the dish itself and end up with a lot of residual chemicals stuck to the dish
I wonder about that myself - would the solution react with the cling film? Or maybe use a tupperware sort of thing that you could twist and the stuff would come off?
If a substance that sticky starts to stick to your cling film, I don't think you'd get it off without ripping the thin stretchy plastic and ending up with a lot of shredded plastic in your product.
Ferric ammonium citrate aka ammonium ferric citrate is a key ingredient in the Scottish soda Irn Bru (it's what gives the drink its bright orange colour). It's possible that exact methodologies for producing this compound are patented as the recipe for Irn Bru is a trade secret.
Awesome Video! Seems like you could make really large prints with this method. Go get a roll of paper and make a massive wall sized print! You can just tape down some sheets of plastic instead of using glass right?
There was another method for photocopying large-format engineering drawings, that stopped being used only about 10 years ago: that also used transparent print for input, needed ammonia, but gave a positive result on white paper (that paper turned purplish as it aged). Would be interesting to show that too.
In my first job out of college, I worked as a refinery process engineer. We'd make these crude sketches that we'd give to the draftsman, Jim Barron. He'd "Barronize" them by drawing on a plastic "vellum" sheet. These were reproduced using a machine that apparently produced diazo prints, a technology that fit between blue prints and large format xerox copiers. A lot of the original plant drawings were blueprints.
"It looked like some sort of plant material..." Like some sort of... plant material Like some sort... of... plant material some sort of plant material... some sort of... plant... material
Having made true blueprints in a drafting class the ammonia smell is something you don't easily forget ;-)... that said I love how your keeping the old style alive. If you had time it would be cool if you offered blueprints of your channel logo to support the channel, I would for sure get one!
Thanks for doing this video. As an architect I've always wondered how the old school blueprints were made. The only ones I got to create were the ones that are ammonia developed and that was only early in my career.
I’d love to see this channel upscale in production but I’m sure there are many reasons on why that’s might be difficult. I’m still following along no matter the pace! Keep up the great work like seriously.
The absurdity of testing acid for acidity was perfect. It forced me to remember it later to be surprised when he added the alkaline iron hydroxide to the neutral ammonium citrate and the pH dropped to three! I will have to remember that as a technique in storytelling and script writing!
I've been wanting to try this process out for ages, but never got round to it... if it's this simple, I might just have to get a cyanotype kit and try it out! A little part of me is trying to figure out a way to make a cyanotype print from a film negative. For full analogue I suspect you'd have to enlarge onto large-format film sheets (which is a fair bit of effort); with digital you could take a scan the film and print it onto OHP transparency. Hmm.
Making prints using transparencies is a lot of fun, you don't even need transparency film though. Laser prints on regular paper placed toner to photo paper works really well.
My high school librarian would do this with the art students and other faculty. It was always pretty fun to help out with when I came down to the library for lunch.
Nitpick from a materials engineering student: the fresh surface of the broken ferric ammonium citrate at 9:33 is CLASSICALLY amorphous, i.e. the polar opposite of crystalline! Which would be expected from the viscous behaviour of the "syrup". Curved, shiny surfaces is a typical feature of brittle amorphous solids like glass. That's a stupid nitpick though, this is a great video!
As a drafting student (we make blueprints, although nowdays it is of course all in CAD an printed out the normal way) its rally interesting how copying was done back then. I can only imagine what a pain drawing on a transparent sheet might have been.
My salutations to Nile Red! You are nothing short of a hero, in light of the recent downfall of Chemplayer. I am very interested in iron chemistry and would like an episode on iron gall ink- the kind of stuff people used for writing for over a millennium.
That's... Actually pretty cool. Your chemistry videos are always fun to watch, but there's just something to the visual flair in this one that stands out. Maybe it's the child in me, but I like the pretty colours for both the chemical solutions and the final product :)
*9:26** "some sort of plant material"*
is it oregano?
Weed
Marijuana lol
Frank22 *DEA intensifies*
it looks like foot lettuce
3:56 "The red colour told me that it was highly acidic, which made sense considering it was a solution of citric acid"
hmmm yes the acid here is made of acid
my God you're right ! the matrix is starting to unravel ! i have to make a new aluminum foil hat ! stat... lol
Peace People
@@worldofwoolol6082 ...okay.
oh yeah...
ofcourse how can i forget the "acids" are made up of "acids"!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The absurdity was perfect.
It forced me to remember it later to be surprised when he added the alkaline iron hydroxide to the neutral ammonium citrate and the pH dropped to three!
@@ScienceForeverKnowYourSciences
There Are *alkaline* amino *acids*
Lizine (9,7)
Histidine (7,6)
Arginine (10,8)
NileRed: \*makes citric acid solution*
Solution: \*is acidic*
NileRed: As I suspected!
ya
@@thegoldengood4725 of
As a cyanotype artist and somebody who is absolutely OBSESSED with Prussian blue, this video series is phenomenal. Holy wow. Thank you so much!
Is there somewhere I could see your art?
you too, eh? :)
Same here.
Why are there so many of us?
The good kush
NANI VEE it's the dollar store, how good could it be
That feeling when you breathe 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
"Plant material" lol
Some. Kind. Of. Plant. Material.
some kind. lol
ruclips.net/video/gsVwrc2-YTs/видео.html
The best chem videos on internet!
Ooh thats a hard one... Cody Reeder is another great chemistry youtuber
Excatly
The best chem channel altoghether!!!
MochaTater is Cody reeder Cody’s lab?
agree
For some reason the part where you mixed up a citric acid solution and tested the ph was so fucking funny to me. "Yep, the red color means it's highly acidic, which makes sense because it's a solution of citric acid"
I also found that hilarious. So matter of fact about stating the obvious haha
OH GOOD not another gatcha studio user
@@gvcvbbhvbbccxcvn gatcha.
Hmm yes, this acid is made of acid
@@gvcvbbhvbbccxcvn gatcha
My dad is an art teacher who specializes in photography. I remember making cyanotypes as a kid OFTEN and he’s even built a darn room in our barn. He does all this science in there and it’s always seemed like magic tricks. It’s so cool to see the science behind it and learn the numbers
New NileRed-Video = better day
theoretically, you could also use sunscreen to draw instead of sharpie because it's designed to cover up UV light. I think it would result in some interesting drawings given the liquidy and natural nature of it
You mean sunblock. Sunscreen allows some rays to pass compared to sunblock.
@@dovier8911 sunscreen = block uva and sunblock = block uvb according to my knowledge just saying
@@automaticexternaldefibrillator Funnily enough in other languages such as French we literally say "sun cream" and nothing else !
@@psirvent8 yes! i was born in korea and we call it sun cream as well
@@psirvent8In finland we call it ”aurinkovoide” which also translates to sun cream.
You can make the prints a darker blue and more stable by washing them with hydrogen peroxide after the water wash.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't H2O2 used for stabilising the blue colour of CrO5 instead of Prussian blue? If not, could you plz explain the chemical reasoning for the same?
@@manswind3417 he’s probably in his third RUclips account since posting his comment… lol not sure he’ll respond 😆
@@manswind3417 it takes a little while for cyanotype to fully finish developing as it oxidizes in free air, h2o2 just speeds up the process
Sweet! I was waiting for this one! Thanks for being so chemically inspiring!
HOLY CRAP!!! HOW HAS NOBODY NOTICED YOU???
@@JAL_EDM its been 3 years, so no
cool to find you here heheheh
I don’t know you but you’re verified, so I have practically nothing to say but a “hi” and a “how are you”
@@JAL_EDM trueeee!
I would totally buy that flower print on a t shirt
Same
Blueprints were still going strong back in the 80's when I worked in a design office. Certainly back then it was difficult to photocopy the A1 and A0 sized paper that much of their design work was done on, so the semi-transparent originals were fed through a semi-automatic blueprint machine which did the UV exposure and curing for you. I still remember the reek of Ammonia in that office!
The Nile Red flower print you made would look amazing as a t-shirt. Literally, pause at 13:36 and everything on the white background. Something to think about.
Thats really cool. Its also neat learning how blueprints worked
Verlisify hi
Cringe
@@kaydenbloomfield7388 ok?
#Poketipsisawesome #StoptheslanderVerlisify
@@flarfschnikelman6780 Jesus christ you are unwell
I want to sleep.........
But nilered vid changes everything
Oh no, i am wrecking your health
It’s true though, it’s hard to fall asleep when you know that you could be watching nilered videos.
Today I learned how classic blueprints were made. It was a great day.
I impulsively bought a cyanotype kit after watching this lol. Great vid!
nice!
Erik Perez
Those are a lot of fun
how did it go with your kit ?
nice to know i wasn't the only one.
peace people
"some kind of plant material"
"blonde Lebanese hashish"
Mark Rainey Shit is lit
trailer park boys?
Some sort of plant material 😩
bqlmoskvich kircho dank weed
looked like some booty weed to me
That doesn’t look like weed guys
Some dab wax yeahhh
Blonde Lebanese hashish
I LIVE for your videos!! As a chemist myself, I really like the way you show RAW lab experiments, especially when something doesn’t work and you explain why! Also, your videos are almost ASMR and I can’t get enough of it! Keep up with the good work!!!
I think you'd really benefit from a silicone spatula in your lab. It will help you scrape things better.
It makes me so happy to see this being discussed outside of photography
Yeah "some sort" of plant material:) :)
stfu
@@rlfefefelsgha3952 what makes you say that
@@pgre he said stfu
@@Cztwastaken what makes them say that
@@thegoldengood4725 HE SAID STF...
I I
U
"Some sort of plant material" ayy
11:38 - "Uh-oh, he missed a spot."
12:34 - "Surely now he will notice."
12:47 - "...bedamned."
In 5th grade, they gave us each a stack of blue UV-sensitive paper, and we had a section of the classroom set up as a makeshift darkroom, with a dim red light, trays of various things (water, some fixatives or other, heck if I remember anymore), a string with clothespins on it... It was hell of fun, and we felt like we were Serious Artists, although how many silhouettes of leaves and outlines of hands does one classroom really NEED, eh?
If my kid brought that home, I’d be hanging it on the wall. Great stuff.
HE MISSED A PETAL WHEN HE WAS GOING OVER THE DRAWING OMG
Cermet Hahahaha I was looking through the comments to see if someone noticed it 😂😂😂
same.
i'd like it but its at 69
So?
Welp. Now I can't unsee it.
I really appreciate how watchable these videos are, you don't have to have a Phd to understand exactly what's going on. Love these vids, never stop!
This was really cool to see. My father used to circuit diagrams with cyanotype to both verify the transparency blocks enough UV to produce a good circuit board as well as to create the circuit diagram that would be included with the board (usually slide into a clear plastic sleeve inside the casing of whatever the board went into. I was very young at the time, around 8 years old and have wondered ever since how he managed to produce the beautiful blue diagrams using the same transparency that was used for the board. This video really brought back some memories. A nice addendum to this technique is that you can print onto the transparencies using an inkjet printer if you set the printer to gray scale and ramp up the print quality (note that some printers cheat on gray scale and mix in color to reduce black ink usage).
"So I ended up bust buying it from ebay" Ebay really is the place where you can buy, just about everything, ever.
Impressively done! Worked construction for years, that color blue will always have a spot in my heart.
Bro, you know so much about chemistry. Well done, I truly admire how high quality your vids are and I don't even copy them, I just watch for fun XD
As a final step in the cyanotype process, I have always used a finishing bath. The blue color of the print will fully develop over the next week or so, but if you want it done immediately, add approximately 10 mils of 3% hydrogen peroxide to 500 mils of distilled water. Put this solution in a second tray and give the print a dip before you hang it to dry. The color will instantly darken and become richer.
RUclips, why I didn't get a notification when one of my favourite RUclipsrs uploaded a new vijeo?
That's the way very, very old blueprints were made. I'm an Olde-Timey Civil Engineer, and the blueprints we made were the opposite of what was shown. The background remained white, while the drafted work was dark. We would use blacks pens and pencils for drafting, and LeRoy lettering stencils for notes. For construction lines, we would use blue pencils (as they would not show up on the print), while red pencils were used for lighter lines, such as dimension extension lines. Ammonia was used to cure the print, and I remember many a day spent in a poorly ventilated print room running drawings. This was circa 1985 until about 2002.
Yay another NileRed video!
Why is chem at Uni not like this most times it was:
Colourless Liquid A *+* Colourless Liquid B *=* Pointless Colourless Liquid C
Little Bacchus they were trolling you and you were just mixing 2 beakers with water lol
This photochemistry is so cool! Very analogous to how photographs were made before digital cameras
I was really looking forward to this. It's impressive that you made the type that could be developed in water, just like the kits I played with as a kid. I would have figured a homebrew would have involved a separate development chemical to be added later.
Fifty years ago, I had a summer job that involved blueprints. I worked next to a huge machine that made prints that were six feet wide. A big tank of anhydrous ammonia fed into the machine, and the guy who operated the machine told me that the ammonia fumes "developed" the prints. And all the blueprints I handled (not just from the big machine) smelled of ammonia. What does this have to do with the process you just demonstrated?
Ace Lightning Slightly different process if I remember things right.
It looked very much the same, including how the white parts were pale greenish-yellow until everything was developed. But, as I said, that was fifty years ago...
Probably just a different chemical process.
That is Diazo print, also known as Diazotype, Dyline print, Whiteprint and blueline print. It was a lot cheaper and easier than the cyanotype/blueprint process but unlike cyanotype the prints have limited durability and will fade if exposed to light for a few weeks. Wikipedia has a good description of the process under 'Whiteprint'.
Ace Lightning Those were diazo prints. Totally different chemistry
I'd like to throw this one in there, but in most cases you could use a silicone baking tray and flex it to separate the desiccated product instead of painstakingly scraping the vessels! Hope this helps you!
I followed the procedure and everything looked exactly what you got, however when I mixed the solutions of the ferric ammonium citrate and the potassium ferricyanide I got lots of prussian blue, i have worked in low light far from UV lights so I don't know what is going on. Edit:How to solve this below
Update: I finally fixed the problem, well it was obvious that I was getting some iron (II) contamination but i didn't knew were it came from but after some experimenting I found the cause to be my bad quality ferric chloride, it was contaminated with lots of iron (II) plus while it was supposed to be 20% was actually a 32% solution so I ended up with a large excess of uncomplexed iron (II). To avoid this problem in the first place I would recommend to add some hydrogen peroxide to your iron hydroxide to be sure its fully oxidized, It should look reddish not black as in the video. In case your Ferric ammonium citrate ends up like mine it can be fixed easily by adding some hydrogen peroxide drop wise until it becomes slightly brown, then add drop wise a saturated solution of ammonium citrate and mix until it becomes slightly green, let it rest for a few minutes and test the solution, if it keeps turning blue when mixed with the potassium ferricyanide add more Ammonium citrate solution, keep doing this until you no longer get the blue color. Also I made Ferric ammonium oxalate and its much easier to make plus is far more sensitive to light than the citrate, the only problem is that it leaves a rusty tinge on paper so not ideal for cyanotype but amazing for ferric gelatin (holography) experiments.
How does one get in touch here? Thanks for that info. For the last few weeks I've been working on this and using different sources of iron, with mixed results. Don't know enough to be able to figure things out myself. I have currently a batch (made from purchased iron filings) that is red. I also bubbled air through it for a few days before adding H2O2. I believe that Mike Ware's new cyanotype formula uses ferric ammonium oxalate; how did you make it?
@@sizzlenotsteak To make the ferric ammonium oxalate, prepare iron hydroxide in the same way as when you make it for the ferric ammonium citrate, then once you have your iron hydroxide add a saturated solution of oxalic acid, i recommend to do this on a hot plate, I made it around 80C° but shouldn't matter the temperature, add the solution until all the iron hydroxide dissolves and the solution becomes acidic then let it cool, it should look yellow-green wit no precipitate, if you have precipitate filter it because that is likely ferrous oxalate so not good, we need ferric oxalate which is soluble and in oxidation state III.
Prepare a saturated ammonium oxalate solution and add it to the ferric oxalate solution you prepared earlier, it will become brilliant green, that's the ferric ammonium oxalate. I didn't used any stochiometry when i made mine, it was just a quick test to see if it worked so i just added an excess of ammonium oxalate, you can add a few drops of H2O2 at this point just to be sure its fully oxidized to iron III, just a little H2O2 there is no need to add too much. To remove most of the excess ammonium oxalate I boiled down the solution until the excess ammonium oxalate started precipitating, filtered it and then put it on the fridge to cool to crystallize as much ammonium oxalate as possible and filtered it again.
Its hard to crystallize the ferric ammonium oxalate its very soluble but you can let the solution fully evaporate so it crystallizes as emerald color crystals, it will have a lot of the ammonium oxalate though but seems still works good enough for cyanotypes and ferric gelatin (if you are into holography). It seems that ferric potassium oxalate might be easier to make because it has lower solubility therefore much easier to purify by crystallization, i haven't tried it yet but if i do i post results here.
Just some notes I might add, the ferric oxalate and the ferric ammonium oxalate are more light sensitive than the citrate so try working far from daylight or anything with too much blue or UV light, the drops of H2O2 added in one of the steps help to convert back any photoreduced iron so it should be ok to work under good ilumination, like warm LED lights or incandescent. Good luck!
@@teresashinkansen9402 Thank you so much! Will get to work on this, will let you know how it turns out. :)
@@sizzlenotsteak You are welcome, I hope it works for you.
this is so fun! i remember doing something like this in my high school chemistry class, but with tshirts! we soaked the shirts in the solution and brought in designs that the teacher had printed for us on clear plastic, and it worked much the same way! it was a very cool and an unforgettable project
Hey Nile, could you try making something out of an alloy that's 50% iron, 25% vanadium and 25% cobalt?
It would be nice to actually see someone make CoVFeFe.
HugoH yes
HugoH it would just be CoVFe, though
CoVFe2 or CoVFe(ii)Fe(iii)?
I guess either will be fine, all I want him to do is make an object out of it. A coin probably, or a sculpture of Donald Trump.
Who says you have to support Drumph to mock it?
This is prob my fav of yours. Really really cool! Love to see the pics when you upload next. I always wondered how blueprints were made. I am a musician and many older parts for musicals were printed (developed) this way I believe. The music was the same blue color on a white background. The paper was always very heavy
My favorite chemistry channel
This is actually surprisingly similar to a way older form of blueprint used in fabrics. Essentially it is a method in which you first use wooden printing blocks to transfer a colour-resistant substance onto the fabric (a variety of substances were used and the specific recipe tends to be a secret specific to the printer). In the next step the fabric got coloured with indigo and finally the colour-resistant substance got removed from the fabric using diluted sulphuric acid. There are still some few printers who use this method and in much of central Europe it is considered part of the immaterial cultural heritage
I love your videos and also find it highly amusing how it seems like everything made ends up looking like a drug of some sort or just downright odd.
The blue print stile was often used up to at least the early 90's for working copies of large drawings. It was a lot faster and cheaper to use then printer and plotters. The orignal was plottet on a large semi transparent plastic sheet and when you needed a copy it was put into a blue-printer that made an one-to-one A1 or larger copy in a minutt or so.
I'd love to see you do more of these photographic processes.
There are so many other, non-silver processes out there. Getting the chemicals is all you need. Many of the silver processes easily react to light, while some of the non-silver (such as a number of the dichromate salts) tend to require significant exposure to light or near UV.
I've done a few years ago an internship for an aerospace subcontractor and the design department still printed their design on transparency for archiving. I guess it's a remnant from the old blueprint process! It's also quite convenient because you can quickly compare 2 revisions of the same part by overlaying the drawings.
When Architects and engineers need a degree in chemistry to use their art skills on paper
Awesome video. I really like the way the final cyanotype looks. You could get some cool looking images from using plants and leaf skeletons. Thanks for sharing this.
Because of your videos, I started to like chemistry. Best chemistry videos on internet.
I found this interesting because I used to work at a microfiche service bureau and the duplicates of the original silver-halide film was copied on to 105mm diazo film (exposed with with UV light and then developed with a little anhydrous ammonia).
History, chemistry, physics and home science all bundled into witty, fun to watch videos.
Thanks for the awesome videos and boooooo too those who report such channels that educate rather than report the prank channels.
such an interesting video! I used to work for an engineering firm and I came across a lot of old blueprints when I sorted through the archives so it's pretty neat to learn how they were actually processed
For evaporation water and solidifying stuff, why don't you line the dish with cling film? When it is fully evaporated, I imagine it'll be much simpler to take the cling film away than to evaporate it on the dish itself and end up with a lot of residual chemicals stuck to the dish
I wonder about that myself - would the solution react with the cling film? Or maybe use a tupperware sort of thing that you could twist and the stuff would come off?
If a substance that sticky starts to stick to your cling film, I don't think you'd get it off without ripping the thin stretchy plastic and ending up with a lot of shredded plastic in your product.
I wonder if he washes his beakers in the dishwasher...
@@rubenproost2552 he doesnt!! most solutions he uses arent dishwasher safe
Ferric ammonium citrate aka ammonium ferric citrate is a key ingredient in the Scottish soda Irn Bru (it's what gives the drink its bright orange colour). It's possible that exact methodologies for producing this compound are patented as the recipe for Irn Bru is a trade secret.
Awesome Video! Seems like you could make really large prints with this method. Go get a roll of paper and make a massive wall sized print! You can just tape down some sheets of plastic instead of using glass right?
Or you could use an entire bedsheet
There was another method for photocopying large-format engineering drawings, that stopped being used only about 10 years ago: that also used transparent print for input, needed ammonia, but gave a positive result on white paper (that paper turned purplish as it aged). Would be interesting to show that too.
7:28 "I also re-added the stir bar and turned on some *_S T R O N K_* stirring."
Nile has taught me more about chemistry in a year, than I learned all through high school.
I love how he uses a piece of paper to measure the height on a beaker that has graduations on it
In my first job out of college, I worked as a refinery process engineer. We'd make these crude sketches that we'd give to the draftsman, Jim Barron. He'd "Barronize" them by drawing on a plastic "vellum" sheet. These were reproduced using a machine that apparently produced diazo prints, a technology that fit between blue prints and large format xerox copiers. A lot of the original plant drawings were blueprints.
"It looked like some sort of plant material..."
Like some sort of... plant material
Like some sort... of... plant material
some sort of plant material...
some sort of... plant... material
Having made true blueprints in a drafting class the ammonia smell is something you don't easily forget ;-)... that said I love how your keeping the old style alive. If you had time it would be cool if you offered blueprints of your channel logo to support the channel, I would for sure get one!
Awesome!
Thanks for doing this video. As an architect I've always wondered how the old school blueprints were made. The only ones I got to create were the ones that are ammonia developed and that was only early in my career.
11:30, he missed a part of the petal, i'm shaking
No ur not
I’d love to see this channel upscale in production but I’m sure there are many reasons on why that’s might be difficult. I’m still following along no matter the pace! Keep up the great work like seriously.
Its crazy how complicated these things were just a few decades ago...
Things are only easier for the average person.
You mean like its still complicated for these people that do these things? I suppose it could be idk I just imagine them using digital stuff
I really enjoy these videos.
You should totally make a video on making an uranotype.
I think it turned out great. Looking forward to the next one.
You could honestly make a video compilation of all of the reactions you've done put to groovy music
The absurdity of testing acid for acidity was perfect.
It forced me to remember it later to be surprised when he added the alkaline iron hydroxide to the neutral ammonium citrate and the pH dropped to three!
I will have to remember that as a technique in storytelling and script writing!
That would be cool on a shirt design.
The photo process works fine on cotton cloth. Jeans were traditionally dyed with indigo/Prussian blue so it is stable with washing.
Yay been waiting for this!
9:47 forbidden weed
I like how you increased the saturation of your blueprint in the thumbnail to make it more blue
I've been wanting to try this process out for ages, but never got round to it... if it's this simple, I might just have to get a cyanotype kit and try it out!
A little part of me is trying to figure out a way to make a cyanotype print from a film negative. For full analogue I suspect you'd have to enlarge onto large-format film sheets (which is a fair bit of effort); with digital you could take a scan the film and print it onto OHP transparency. Hmm.
For film, you can do a high res digital scan and then laser print that onto a transparency...I think
Making prints using transparencies is a lot of fun, you don't even need transparency film though. Laser prints on regular paper placed toner to photo paper works really well.
CosmoSnowmew just project the negative onto the cyanotype sheet?
I can't wait to see the video on developing digital pictures! I had never heard of cyanotyping before, so this is a great introduction.
9:26 the good kush
My high school librarian would do this with the art students and other faculty. It was always pretty fun to help out with when I came down to the library for lunch.
*doesn’t color over one pedal when going over sharpie*
Me: *heavy breathing*
Love your vids man, thanks for all your great work.
"Some sort of plant material."
seeing it transform into blue was soooo cool! thank you for the video 😄
9:35 “plant Material” ;)
Nitpick from a materials engineering student: the fresh surface of the broken ferric ammonium citrate at 9:33 is CLASSICALLY amorphous, i.e. the polar opposite of crystalline! Which would be expected from the viscous behaviour of the "syrup". Curved, shiny surfaces is a typical feature of brittle amorphous solids like glass. That's a stupid nitpick though, this is a great video!
9:28 "Some sort of plant material"
Ok then...
As a drafting student (we make blueprints, although nowdays it is of course all in CAD an printed out the normal way) its rally interesting how copying was done back then. I can only imagine what a pain drawing on a transparent sheet might have been.
I've always wondered how you clean your glassware. I always spend way too much time on each piece. Do you use any specific chemicals or cleaners?
My salutations to Nile Red! You are nothing short of a hero, in light of the recent downfall of Chemplayer. I am very interested in iron chemistry and would like an episode on iron gall ink- the kind of stuff people used for writing for over a millennium.
14:18 CHINATOWN SINGAPORE!
Good catch
@@NileRedI just made what I call Prussian brown (Prussian blue using copper sulfate
That's... Actually pretty cool. Your chemistry videos are always fun to watch, but there's just something to the visual flair in this one that stands out. Maybe it's the child in me, but I like the pretty colours for both the chemical solutions and the final product :)
Where did you buy all that weed tho
If that's how your extracts look, someone's doing something wrong.
TickyTack23 how? I just pick the weeds from my lawn and glue them together with sperm
This is a disturbing conversation
NileBlue