A decades’ worth of brownies – Making some Van Dyke brown prints

So apparently 2025 is my 10-year anniversary for making Van Dyke brown prints. To celebrate, I made some more. Seriously though – I was making some prints and thought to snap some pics of the process while I was working. Just now as I started writing, I realized I made my first Van Dyke in 2015.

In case you wonder what those first prints looked like, as it turns out, I scanned one back then, so I can include it here:

Looks pretty neat presented this way. I did tidy up that scan so the borders are all white. And I’m pretty sure the contrast of the real print wasn’t quite what you’d make it out to be on the digital example. Ah well – the image above is nice in its own right. I probably have the print somewhere, too, but I’d have to dig it up. And in all honesty, I expect it’s pretty badly faded by now. My processing has always been kind of sloppy, and it really hasn’t changed all that much!

Oh, I also recall that the image above I originally shot on Ilford PanF+ which I probably developed in Rodinal. I also remember the negatives being eerily thin indeed. I scanned them and the Van Dyke print was made from an inkjet-printed digital negative. I used pretty poor inkjet film back then, which only juuust worked for this purpose.

This morning, I was playing with a 4×5″ negative (Fomapan 200) that I had exposed and developed over the past two days. Nothing special; just something to scratch the itch. I had just filled a pitcher with water and some fresh mint, and figured that the sunlight might do pretty things with it. So I added a glass to go with it and put them on the table in the backyard.

Exposure was liberal (EI160 or so, and metered for the shadow area in front of the jug) and development was very moderate on this negative – 6 minutes in Pyrocat HD 1+1+100 with constant agitation in my DIY BTZS-style tube. The result is a rather soft negative with good detail throughout the tonal scale. The pyro stain gives just enough punch to get the job done with Van Dyke brown.

Here’s our negative – as you can see, there’s tonality all over the place. Whatever the heck that means. Seriously though, it has differentiation across the entire image area and shadow regions are robust, which helps a lot with this process.

I did some density measurements, but the features are kind of small on this negative. The base is around 0.1logD, the background in the center right of the image is around 0.35logD or so on the blue channel. The brightest area at the bottom right of the glass hovers around 1.5logD on the blue channel, but I know that the actual highlights must be more dense (the 1mm aperture on my DIY densitometer averages out everything in that circle), and there’s the stain that results in UV density being even higher than what I measure on the blue channel.

Many moons ago, Sandy King wrote an article about Van Dyke prints which I consider is still the most straightforward, truthful and fail-safe piece I’ve read on this process. He remarks that the optimal density range of the negative would be around 1.8logD. It seems that this here negative is pretty close to that ideal spot. Well, that’s not a coincidence – I looked at the negative and figured “there might be an OK Van Dyke hiding in there”, so I really picked the process to suit the negative. Anyway, let’s get on with the printing already.

The sensitizer for Van Dyke prints is as easy as 1-2-3. Or, rather, 3-2-1. I take 3 drops of 20% ferric ammonium citrate solution, add 2 drops of 11% silver nitrate, which results in something that looks like you’re going through a particularly bad spell of hay fever:

To clear that up, add 1 drop of 10% tartaric acid, and a pale green-yellow solution results that can be coated onto a suitable paper. I find that this amount of solution (effectively 6 drops) will coat a 4×5″ area with a liberal margin on a not-too-absorbent paper. I prefer to brush coat, because it’s super quick and easy.

I don’t add any surfactant (Tween, Photoflo) to the sensitizer as I find it creates more problems than it solves. If a paper doesn’t coat nicely, I just try a different type. Many papers work fine with this process.

A brief note on acidifying papers: the iron-based printing processes (which Van Dyke ultimately is, as the light-sensitive compound is ferric ammonium citrate) tend to stain permanently on papers that are alkaline buffered. Many people use papers that do not have these buffers, but those papers are rare and relatively expensive (funny, since the manufacturer essentially can leave stuff out – there’s microeconomics for you).

Alkaline buffered papers can be soaked for a few minutes in a weak solution of e.g. sulfamic acid to neutralize these buffers (do NOT use oxalic acid as in the Sandy King article I linked to – Mike Ware explicitly warns against it in his Chrysonomicon). From time to time, I test that, but always come back to using paper as it comes, without pre-soaking it in anything. I find the papers I use tend to coat the best and most evenly without such measures, and careful processing can avoid most or all of the staining.

However, for the illustrations in this post, I did use a scrap of paper I had soaked in citric acid for a few minutes. The results were poor with quite horrible blotchiness and a spot that wouldn’t clear after printing no matter how I washed it, which only fortifies my belief that using papers as they are is in principle preferable.

The sensitized paper has a pale greenish hue to it. After coating it, I blast it dry with a hairdryer on high heat, so I can continue to expose it within a minute or so after coating it.

Van Dyke creates a bit of a print-out image, but it is (or should be) not much. Exposure should be enough to bring out the deepest shadows and some of the midtones, but none of the highlights. Like so:

Note that I mask the print – unlike 10 years ago, I currently don’t like the naturally brushed borders. Moreover, having masked borders makes it so much easier to tell if there’s any staining after processing the print. So apart from the tidy borders, there’s also a technical reason to mask prints.

The elegance of the Van Dyke process is that most of the ‘development’ is really nothing more than just washing out the unexposed, unreacted sensitizer, which in principle should remain water soluble. Using slightly acidified tap water helps to prevent the formation of insoluble iron complexes in this step. I use citric acid for this purpose and the amount used is both minimal and non-critical. I’d say maybe half a teaspoon to a liter of water or so.

When the exposed paper hits the first bath of acidified water, magic happens, as the image immediately appears in its full strength, albeit it in a striking reddish hue:

I then proceed to wash it in acidified tap water until the borders are entirely clear of any yellow, and the image itself has turned a somewhat sickly pale greenish yellow hue. This generally takes two or three changes of water and maybe 3-5 minutes in total.

Van Dyke Brown prints require little fixing – but they do require it alright. I use very dilute color film (C41) fixer for this purpose, mostly because it’s pretty much the only fixer I use for whatever process. In this case, it also has the advantage of being virtually pH neutral. Using an acidic fixer can bleach Van Dyke prints quite quickly. I use C41 fixer at a high dilution of around 1+20 or so – again it’s not critical, and the fixing time can be kept fairly brief to a few minutes. The final wash is more important.

Pouring the fixer onto the print again produces a dramatic change; most of the intensity that was lost during the first wash procedure is restored at this point.

For prints I’m going to tone with gold toner, I also prefer to fix first to prevent any staining. I use thiourea gold toner, and the thiourea can bind with remaining traces of silver chloride if toning is done before fixing. The resulting silver sulfide leaves a nasty stain that cannot be removed from the print. Toning after fixing does not bring this risk. After fixing, a brief rinse is a good idea before toning the print.

For the toner, I use the same recipe listed in the Sandy King article. For convenience’s sake, I mix this as a two-part concentrate which I can combine immediate before use with the required amount of water. I mix only what I need for a single print, use it until it’s more or less exhausted and then discard the used toner. I’ve tried keeping it around, but never found the used toner to be of any use despite the trace amount of gold that might still be in there. It tends to collect as wispy strands of reddish colloidal gold at the bottom of the bottle. Somewhat pretty, but ultimately a waste of space, nonetheless.

As said, I use a two-part concentrate approach for the gold toner based on the Sandy King article. Concentrate A has the following composition:

	% w/v	g per 100ml
Thiourea (thiocarbamide)	0.5%	0.5
Tartaric acid	0.5%	0.5
Sodium chloride	20%	20

Thiourea is a suspected carcinogen, it may affect fertility and it may cause an enlarged thyroid gland – in short, it’s nasty stuff, so don’t eat it. However, it’s perfectly safe if handled in such a way that you don’t get it inside your body, which is easy enough to do.

Concentrate B is a 1% w/v solution of gold chloride (1g per 100ml). Yup, that’s an expensive bottle! Fortunately, a little goes a long way.

The concentrates are mixed in a ratio of 2:1:17. Take 17ml water and add 2ml of part A, then 1ml of part B to make 20ml of toner. You’ll notice that upon adding the yellow gold chloride, the color neutralizes within a few seconds if you stir. That’s a good thing; the gold isn’t gone at that point.

The ratios aren’t all that critical. I often start with a more dilute toner out of frugality, so I might take 25ml water, add 1ml A and 0.5ml B and see how far I get with toning. If toning stalls, I pour the toner back into a beaker and add a few more drops of gold chloride solution, then pour back the toner onto the print. You only have to use as much gold chloride as needed for that one print.

Toning progresses rapidly at least at the first stage in my experience and the first onset is visible almost immediately. See the series of photos above; I poured the toner directly in the middle of the print (which I would not recommend), and within seconds the print tone in that area has started to change. The toner is then waltzed across the surface of the print until the extent of the toning is to my liking. I usually tone until I see no more change to the hue, which is about the stage shown at the right. The entire toning process takes 5-10 minutes. It starts fast, then slows down and at some point there’s just very little change visible anymore. At that point I usually call it good.

After toning, it’s a good idea to rinse and briefly re-fix the print, although I’m not entirely certain if it’s absolutely necessary. It doesn’t hurt, in any case. Finally, wash the print very thoroughly with several changes of water over at least a 30 minute period, preferably an hour.

The thing with Van Dyke prints is that they seem very colorful when wet – but they get a lot duller once dry. Below are some of the prints I made this morning. The one shown earlier in this article is the one to the right. Note it has a few nasty blotches along the top edge due to acidifying the paper. This has also rendered the final print more colorful and more reminiscent of an untoned print (shown to the left).

The print in the middle is the one I’m the most happy about, which is gold toned and on untreated paper (not acidified). It has that noble purple-brown I appreciate in these prints. The untoned print on the left is overexposed by about 30%; it’s evidently too dark.

The photo shown above is a bit misleading; the prints in real life look a bit more muted with less strong blacks than what the camera phone has made of it. Paper choice makes a real difference with Van Dyke prints – if you’re looking for solid blacks, try a couple of different papers and see if you can find something that not alkaline buffered.

Still, these prints look quite nice in reality – sort of soft and mellow, yet with crisp detail where the image is sharp. They are also as matte as the original paper, which is impossible to get with regular silver gelatin prints. Even after a decade, I still find there’s magic in these “alternative” printing processes.

As to keeping the prints around – Van Dykes aren’t too archival in my experience. Or, I should say: they can probably be quite archival, but they require absolutely meticulous processing as well as proper storage to last a long time. I too often cut short a wash cycle after 5 or 10 minutes, which tends to result in staining appearing after months or years. The silver image itself may also fade, which I’ve seen happening on a print that has adorned our bathroom for almost a decade. For me, the fun is mostly in making these prints. If I want something that’s built to last, I’d rather make a carbon print. But a Van Dyke scratches the itch a lot quicker!