Unknown area in Gum printing?
Hi all, I tried my second attempt. Just a basic outline first on what I did. Arches smooth 300gsm and Fabriano Acquarello 300gsm 1. boiling water pre shrinked for 10mins. Dried for a day.( no more speckles in the Arches) 2.Gelatin 3g to 500ml, cold water for 10 mins... Heated to 43 degree Celsius. 3.Added paper to the tray of gelatin for a minute, took excess gelatin off by sliding the paper on the side of the tray. Dried for the day. Stored the same Gelatin in the fridge 4.Reheated the gelatin the next day. Recoated the paper the same way. Dried. Didnt add any hardner as yet, as I cant seem to get time to go buy any! :) 5ml 13% Pot Dich + 5ml Gum 35% + Windsor&Newton LAMP BLACK a very SMALL smudge! (coudnt get any Ivory black as yet, will do so..) Coated paper, fan dried for 15mins. Added a negative with squares 2% increments made in photoshop from white to black. Each 2% square has a number on it, which should clearly be seen when printed. The sheet of Arches had 3 of the same negatives on it, each exposed 4, 6, and 8 mins. Just covered each negative when it passed the min mark. Developed for 5 mins face down in room temp water. Next tray developed for 5 mins face down in room temp water. Next tray developed for 20mins same room temp water. On the Arches paper I got: What I got was NO staining in highlights or midtones or the whole paper. They looked ok though a little on the light side the tones came up. Can read all the incremented 2% numbers in those areas. The shadows are another business altogether, what I got was a massive yellow staining probably from the dichromate, plus it looked like a real mess as I couldnt really make out the incremental numbers from the negative. The mess seemed like too much watercolour overpigmented, its not one colour but just smudges of watercolour and yellow staining. Reading Katharine suggestions, I'm thinking what I'm looking at could be OVERexposure? or the small Smudge I used from the lamp black is still too much pigment!? I doubt it was caused by overcoating, as I turned each of the 3 negs upside down side by side, got the same result on each part of the print. Could it be my sizing, and not using a hardner? Though the Highlights and Midtones look good? I got kind of fed up looking at the yellow staining and used a 5% potassium metabisulfite solution, sprayed with a hand held spray gun. Didnt work as well, next time i'll use a tray bath. The other Fabriano Aquarello paper I'll add more info on it later can't recall what it looked like, but had the same sort of problems as above. I'll scan the prints when I get home and upload to a website. Cheers Jacek
|