U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | RE: Gum Application

RE: Gum Application

Don, I don't doubt what you say about the rollers, tho it hasn't come up for me -- I've never had a problem with plain old foam brush & hake & if it ain't broke, why do a workaround? It's anyway been my observation that the *look* of the coat before drying/exposure is in a sense irrelevant. Or anyway deceptive.

If your megative has tonal variations beyond, say, sand dunes and open sky, the imagery will more than cancel any seeming uneven-ness in the newly applied coat. The coat as a one-tone field shows every imperfection... which vanishes when the tones and variations of the actual image appear.

Not to mention that you guys in the wide open spaces can fill your grand workrooms with all those rollers & water troughs and still have room to swing a cat, or anyway sit down. My city space is so crowded that when the phone rings it can take me so long to weave through the obstacles to answer it that folks ask if I was asleep.

And something else: about using paraffin for paper negatives. For years I used it and fed it to my students, until I did some close examination of the effects (including densitometer readings) for a feature on paper negatives (either P-F #8 or #9). Denial was useless, -- no matter how carefully applied and melted and spread, the paraffined paper was ALWAYS mottled... seen especially when held up to the light.

It also dried out starting from Day One. Did those mottles affect the printed image? In many cases yes, as when pearly youthful skin tones were compromised. I didn't map and quantify it from that point on, but simply changed tactics.

Someone had suggested beeswax so I tried it -- and it was like magic. It seems many others use it also. If I were still teaching I'd assign a variable test -- waxing with beeswax vs paraffin for making a gum print. But actually, no need -- The beeswax is more archival, and all around better. There's really no downside (except the pound of leftover paraffin).

In a sense, that's the opposite of what I'm saying about the look of the overall emulsion coat before exposure... (another subtlety of gum !).

Judy


On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Don Bryant wrote:

Judy,




I use a dense foam roller to apply my gum coats, and they are smooth to



the



point of being clinical.



Clay's remark is right on target in my experience. The micro foam roller
yields the smoothest results I have gotten.

Second to that are the coatings one can get with Connoisseur brand hake
brushes recommended by Chris Anderson. Pricey, but worth the money in my
experience; they seem to never shed. Add to that a badger hair blending
brush and viola`, no streaking.






improving it because the roller itself was the very devil
to wash out... Our water is metered, and that year we were probably also
having a drought... if I wanted to use the same roller for a different
color.... Oi !! Gallons... and taking forever.





Yes the washout is the con for the micro foam roller but I purchased a bunch
of them with handles and soak them in water with clear house hold ammonia
for a day and they wash out very easily, though there is a bit of stain
left. The stain has no consequence on the next use even with a different
color. And the rollers do require about twice the amount of
pig+gum+dichromate but the coatings are smooth and repeatable with a little
practice.

My 2 cents,

Don Bryant