U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: Was Re: question on sizing, now fish eyes

Re: Was Re: question on sizing, now fish eyes



Gee, I didn't mean to disrupt your day Katharine, but then, I often do things before showering, and sometime the whole day even goes by before I get dressed :) The reference to the bubbling was buried inside another thread about "how many layers of gum"...

Anyway, the second image looks like what I was getting...big bubbly spots. I get better results now when I brush the gum mixture on thinner (not a thinner mixture, but less on the brush). I really think a lot of my mistakes are just a matter of getting the feel of things.

And now I understand why Payne's Gray looks so blue...duh, it has blue in it. Thanks!
Laura


Katharine Thayer wrote:
Laura, I can't find the other thread you referred to so maybe it was under a title that wouldn't identify it as being about a coating problem with Payne's grey. However, since "Payne's grey" isn't a pigment in and of itself, but is simply a convenience mixture of some blue (different manufacturers use different blues) and lamp black, it's unlikely that it would behave in some way that would be linkable to the color name "Payne's grey."

When I got your post, I thought "good timing," because I've been planning to get back to my troubleshooting page, which I've been promising for a couple of years. So I went downstairs even before I'd had my shower, to make fisheyes to show you. But as I said, I seldom encounter fisheyes, so it wasn't such a simple job to make them happen. The "fisheyes" I occasionally get (on Arches bright white sized with gelatin-glyoxal) are very small, almost like pinpricks, so maybe they really don't qualify as fisheyes, except that they appear in the same way as larger fisheyes, as a visible lateral retraction of the emulsion from areas of the paper. Anyway, this morning I couldn't make that happen on Arches bright white, so I pulled a piece out of my stack of different kinds of paper sized with different stuff; this one happened to be Lana sized with gelatin and glutaraldehyde, and got the kind of fisheyes I'm talking about; I've scanned that for you.

I also tried to make the bigger kind of fisheyes, the ones that open up to 1/4" or 1/2" wide and really look like fisheyes, by coating on Yupo, but was unsuccessful until I added a little water to the mix, and then got some of these fisheyes. I took a picture of this with my cheap digital point and shoot; it's blurry but I hope you can make it out. I'd be interested to know if people mean one or the other, or something different, when they refer to "fisheyes."

In both cases I left the fisheyes as they first appeared rather than attempting to brush them out, so as to not obscure what they look like in their undisturbed manifestation.

http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/fisheyes.html

That page is temporary, just uploaded for sake of this particular discussion.
Katharine


On Sep 10, 2008, at 3:01 AM, Laura Valentino wrote:

Does anyone have a scan of this "fisheye" effect they could share? A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a "bubbling" with payne's gray, so I also wondered if it was something related to the pigment. Or it could've been because it was a different brand of paint, because that was the only variable that changed from the other colors I was trying. I washed the layer all away (after learning here I could do that) so I can't share the effect I got.

Laura

zphoto@montana.net wrote:


Also, because I get it consistently with magenta and not
yellow I think it must have some relation with the coating
but maybe not the gum, maybe the pigment or who knows.  I'll
watch it for a while and see if I can determine any other
factor that might play into it.