Re: Van Dyke question(s)
Sandy!!!!!
Are you holding back on us?? Is THAT what the secret ingredient in
Artigue/Fresson is????
Chris
Sam,
Please leave my testes out of this discussion!!
Sandy
At 7:18 PM -0500 1/15/08, sam wang wrote:
Judy,
I have a few lovely violet to red tinted VDs that I toned with gold before
fixing some 20 years ago. Some of them have been shown but most have been
stored in the dark and they all seem to remain unchanged. As far as I can
remember, I was using Nelson's formula because it contained "hypo" which
darkened the tones whereas other gold toner formulas left them much
lighter. It was hard to control though, since the strength of hypo
decreased with each print. I've had very little experience with Clerc's.
Seems to me that the consensus is that VDs are very permanent if properly
processes. Since the silver is on the surface of the paper, it is subject
to environmental damages. Problems is: what's "proper" processing? Sandy
has testes a number of steps to ensure proper fixing and washing but
"weird results" still showed up, even when the silver was all replaced by
pd.
Sam
On Jan 14, 2008, at 11:52 PM, Judy Seigel wrote:
A friend has a commission for a series of prints in Van Dyke Brown, which
she loves... but my experience with a beautiful VDB given to me by
someone else and left out in normal living-room light (fluorescent,
however) is that it faded noticeably -- in about 10 years. Though
meanwhile I have a VDB on glass by Galina that's been hanging in a window
for several years and shows no change at all... I figure, however, that
it must have been toned.
So I told her that:
1. The prints wouldn't be archival unless they were toned, and,
2. Gold toning wouldn't seriously change the color (which was much of the
appeal).
But then I thought, it's at least 10 years -- maybe more -- since I gold
toned a VDB. Do I *really* remember the color? So I said, I'll ask The
List... "they'll know."
I'm also going to give her Liam's wonderful article about "Make your own
gold chloride" from P-F, though she said she doesn't have any gold teeth
or old wedding rings tucked away. (Possibly a gold coin or two, tho my
guess would be that the coin is worth more than the equivalent amount of
gold dust would cost.)
Anyway, comments on toning VDB for archivality, et al., would be much
appreciated... (I also toned VDB with palladium toner, which gave a rich
deep black, but this quest is for the beautiful VDB brown. Would
selenium work? Can you still get selenium?)
TIA,
Judy
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