When I first experimented with this contact staining with natural dye stuffs about ten years ago, I found glossy photo paper to be my favourite of all, since it really makes a three dimensional effect (it looks like the dye goes partly there somewhere under the surface) and, when successful, the details of the matter contact stained can be very sharp.
I then liked especially staining with onion skins (both red onion and yellow onion), because with them you could actually talk more about printing than staining… That is, if you used a lot of water or laid the skins to very moist and soft paper, the result was really staining: colourful patches of dye where the onion skins had been. But by using less moist and glossy photograph printing paper, you could get the imprints of onions. Sometimes just their shape in general, but sometimes the prints were so detailed and sharp, you could actually see the detailed lines of onion skins.
The papers coloured this way are already looking very three-dimensional, so I actually adore the anthotype print made on these papers.
The only thing is, that I’ve run out of the glossy photo paper I originally used, and the ones I’ve tested later are not so good in quality: they wrinkle or lose their glossy surface when moistened. But the search is definitely on!
Anthotypical 