palladium bleeding once again
Well, Happy Labor Day weekend everyone! It may be a true "labor" weekend for this household after all, because my daughter is having her baby in my bathtub any day (or hour) now. Hmmm...that sounds strange....we do have hospitals in MT....ohhhh, never mind... At least I got somewhere today with the bleeding issue. My Platine shipment came in and I was ever so excited to see if the new batch would be different and not bleed. Alas...it still bled like crazy. SO, it helped that Mark Nelson said that at the Formulary (also in MT--similar humidity) they had to do two things to get good prints on Cot 320 this summer: humidify 30 minutes before coating and 30 minutes after. I've watched the humidity all summer and it has hovered around 30%. I messed around with the humidity and Everclear variables--using Everclear or not, humidifying before and not after coating, humidifying after and not before coating, humidifying both before and after. I built myself a makeshift humidity box with a couple of trays and stuck a gauge in there, too. (Of course in the meantime throughout these tests I am racing first to the hardware store for screening and then to the liquor store for my flask of Everclear...I thought of downing the bottle on my way home.) What I found was it was most important to humidify after coating, more important than Everclear or having the paper humidified before. If I humidified before coating, the paper tone was greyer and duller. If I humidified after coating, for 30 minutes (70% humidity) while the paper was drying, there was no bleeding. So it must be as Clay suggested--the stuff is drying too quickly on the paper surface and not sinking in enough. It was so bad on a couple of my test sheets tonight that I could literally take my finger, wipe the wet surface of the print, and have black stains on my fingertip. I was losing quite a bit of density in the print all over, including highlights, and even had serious staining/bleeding into the highlight area, too. So tomorrow I am going to have to develop a new set of curves with this after-coating humidity factor, and will continue this procedure to see if, in fact, the bleeding completely stops. I just have to find someone to build me a drying/humidity rack, now.... I'm still puzzled, though, why during the last couple years I never experienced this, and now I do. If someone has a friend at Arches, could you ask if their paper sizing has changed in the last year? BTW, that green ink on the Epson 2400 is sure as heck dense. The end. Chris
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