Plant-based lith printing

First successful attempt at a plant-based lith print. — Cherry Laurel Lith Prints
4 Images

Remains of Broad Law wood, 2025. Cherry Laurel Lith Print (with exhausted developer causing chaotic infectious development?), 2026 (8"X10"). — Remains of Broad Law wood, 2025. Cherry Laurel Lith Print (with exhausted developer causing chaotic infectious development?), 2026 (8″X10″).

March Dyke on the Radar Road, 2026. Cherry Laurel Lith Print on expired Jessops RC VC Glossy 8"x10" paper. — March Dyke on the Radar Road, 2026. Cherry Laurel Lith Print on expired Jessops RC VC Glossy 8″x10″ paper.

Snow on Beech trees, by Lotus Lodge, 2025. Cherry Laurel Lith Print on expired Jessops RC VC Glossy 8"x10" paper. — Snow on Beech trees, by Lotus Lodge, 2025. Cherry Laurel Lith Print on expired Jessops RC VC Glossy 8″x10″ paper.

Since starting to use my own plant-based developers, I’ve not been making lith prints. I love the quality that lith produces, but it’s a fairly toxic process. So much so that, when I started working with lith developer, I installed extra ventilation in my darkroom to extract the fumes. Still keen to make more lith prints, I searched for alternatives to commercially produced developer, but couldn’t find evidence of anything like this. This is why I decided to research making my own plant-based lith developer.

The developer I had been using is made by the German company, Moersch Photochemie. I was pretty uninformed about the exact make up of lith developer. However, Wolfgang Moersch, provides some helpful information in his guide to lith printing: “Highly diluted hydroquinone developer causes coloured image tones if the print is excessively overexposed, especially if the oxidation products are not captured by sulphite, but instead take part in building up the image. Lith developer contains only one developing substance, hydroquinone.”

With this this knowledge I set about researching naturally occurring sources of hydroquinone. I found a couple of interesting research papers that suggested potential plant material with which to begin my experiments. Antioxidant Activity of Natural Hydroquinones, describes Hydroquinone as a “phenolic structure that appears in secondary plant metabolites present in species with different phylogenies, with the most prominent taxa being found in Ericales, Lamiales and Asterales”. Quantitative Determination of Arbutin and Hydroquinone
in Different Plant Materials by HPLC added Saxifragaceae and Rosaceae as sources of Hydroquinone.

Calluna Vulgaris, or Ling Heather, is in the Ericaceae family and would be my most obvious first plant to try, as it proliferates all around this are. However, at this time of the year it is quite brown, having not yet started its fresh growth, and I thought it might not be sufficiently potent.

I did find a very abundant supply locally of the evergreen Cherry Laurel (Prunus lauracerasus), which is in the Rosaceae family, and this was used for my initial tests.

Cherry Laurel leaves collected for my initial plant-based lith printing experiments.

150g of fresh, finely chopped, Cherry Laurel leaves were added to 1500ml of boiling water. These were left to simmer, on a medium heat, for around an hour.

This reduced to 400ml of liquid, when strained and filtered from the leaves. I initially attempted to use the resulting liquid as a developer without any other additives. This was unsuccessful. For my first test I made a 3 minute exposure and after 23 minutes in the ‘developer’ no sign of an image had appeared. Realising that the liquid was probably not sufficiently alkali, I added 4 teaspoons of sodium carbonate to the tray and within 3 minutes I had my first plant-based lith print – of sorts…

This first result demonstrated some kind of proof of concept. However, probably because the paper had sat in the Cherry Laurel soup for so long, before the addition of the soda, the whites had far too much yellow staining.

The next print I tried took only 90 seconds to produce a clearly recognisable lith print…

First successful plant-based lith print.

For the next test print I decided to dilute the solution with 600ml of water, in order to slow down the developing time, encouraging the “infectious development”, which is characteristic of lith printing, and hopefully producing other colour tones.

Third, not so successful, attempt at plant-based lith print.

The colour intensified far too much and the grey diminished. In order to increase the contrast, and bring up the blacks, I next added another 4 teaspoons of sodium bicarbonate to the solution. After 4 minutes developing this produced a result closer to the first successful print, but not quite as strong.

Fourth attempt at plant-based lith print.

As a final test, in this initial experiment, I tried one more print but with the addition of 1 teaspoon of ascorbic acid (vitamin C powder).

Fifth attempt at plant-based lith print – with added Vitamin C!

The resulting print is muddy, lacking dynamic range and contrast. Ascorbic acid is usually added to plant-based developers to increase the speed of development. Lith printing typically requires a longer development time to enable the “infectious development” process to occur. It is evident from this result that no vitamin C need be added in future tests.