U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: Fish Eyes again

Re: Fish Eyes again



On Sep 15, 2008, at 11:33 PM, Loris Medici wrote:

I have the same problem with the same pigment, Schmincke Ruby Red 351
PV19. BTW, it's a very very strong paint... Do you think that adding
alcohol to the coating mix can help?

Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me, Loris. In the pigment lexicon I understand, strength of pigment refers to its mixing power (or layering power, in our case); a strong pigment needs to be used sparingly in order to keep from overwhelming the other colors that it is mixed or layered with. In other words, with a strong pigment, you need to use much less pigment to get the same color intensity that takes more pigment to achieve with a weaker pigment. (I'm not the first person to notice this; I recently came across a paper where Demachy was making the same point.)

So if the PV 19 is a strong pigment (in my mind, PV 19 is, yes, fairly strong as magentas go, but not as strong as lamp black or pthalo) then it stands to reason that you should be using less of it to balance the other colors than you might use of a different pigment (PR 209, for example, requires a much larger amount of pigment to achieve the same effect) and I would think that it would be a mix that had more pigment in it that would require smoothing out with the Everclear, not one with less pigment. Unless the purpose of the Everclear is to smooth out a watery mix rather than a more heavily- pigmented one. Or unless you're meaning something entirely different by the term. glad you're back, by the way.
Katharine