'Atmosphere' is the product of a GMMAZ / Creative Partnerships funded course of workshops with year 10 students at a secondary school in a deprived part of Manchester. Working with rap artists and a recording technician the aim of the project was to get the students to write and perform rap lyrics based on their experiences, culminating in a live concert and the publication of a book. Our brief was to work with the students to produce illustrations for the book (which we then designed outside of the workshop sessions).

To unify their very varied illustration styles we used a technique called cyanotyping which uses the sun as a light source to make contact prints. 'Cyanotyping' was invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842. Essentially you use a solution of 'prussian blue' to coat a non acid based paper. You can then make a simple contact print by placing a sheet of acetate over the coated paper and exposing it to sunlight for five minutes or so. The paper is then fixed under running water. The beauty of this process is that the more imperfectly you apply the emulsion and the more imperfect the contact between paper and acetate, the more perfect the result!

We transferred the students' pen drawn illustrations to acetate and then made cyanotypes from them. Using the students' cyanotypes we then designed a book of their work