Re: Newbie Gum fun!
Hi Jacek,
Arches is one of those papers that goes speckly without size, and
also goes speckly if you put it in hot water, or size it with hot
size; the hot liquid affects the internal size and the pigment gets
absorbed differentially, making tiny speckles. If you keep the size
under 140 F while sizing, you should be fine.
I don't like the surface of the Fabriano papers myself, but it's true
the Arches papers are trickier to use successfully. As Henry said,
gum is a very subjective medium.
Katharine
On Apr 16, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Jacek wrote:
Hi all,
I've just had my go with coating a pad of Arches Smooth paper
300gsm 100%cotton, I sized one piece in hot water first(no
gelatin), but as I did this, I started getting speckled dots around
a mm, which were lighter than the paper, they covered 3/4 of the
paper? I tried another piece of paper with a hot gelatin solution
(no hot water sizing at all) and put it in the tray, where I got
the same result of speckled mm dots?!
I've tried using a Rough Fabriano Artistico paper with both the hot
water and gelatin sizing, no problems at all there.
Anyhow I hung the Arches to dry last night, I havent as yet checked
the paper this morning.
Perhaps there is an issue with the Arches paper and I should take
it back to the seller?
I have bought the powder form of Gum Arabic, its a straw yellow.
I tried two methods, to make a 35% solution in 100ml (35g of gum).
The first method was to use a coffee filter and put 35g of that in
there and poured distilled water to make 100ml out of it. There was
one big gooey mess in the filter. Which I threw away once I got my
100ml.
The other method was to put the gum 35g in 100ml of water, when I
did this I thought there was no way the gooey mess will actually
dissapear, but as an hour or so progressed it started slowly
disappearing! :) I'll check on it tonight, and might pass that
100ml through a coffee filter to see if any sediment is caught and
throw that away.
What methods do you use to make a solution of gum arabic from powder?
Many thanks
Jacek Gonsalves
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