Re: Masa-gum question for Keith Gerling
On Sep 23, 2008, at 11:10 AM, Keith Gerling wrote: I look forward to discovering those, I think? :--). I love the painterly gestures you've incorporated into the backgrounds of your prints, which I'm guessing are at least partly enabled by the characteristics of the paper. Have you been a painter, too? Your work is very painterly, and I mean that as a compliment.Thanks! There are disadvantages working with masa, but the price makes up for them. With masa you actually get two papers, as the rough side and the smooth side are completely different. There are actually a few interesting little surprises that await those willing to experiment. Actually, not that it matters, but just for the record, I think I may have been the first to try printing gum on masa, or at least to report it on the list. Loris, I think, posted some cyanotype on masa and someone asked me offlist if I'd ever tried gum on masa. I said no, I never had, but I had some masa and would try it just for the heck, and I did and posted it that afternoon. That was... (checking the creation date on the page, which I've since taken offline)...gosh, nearly two years ago. how time flies. I didn't bother to size it, and found the nappy side very difficult to coat smoothly, but the smooth side coated beautifully and easily and printed well too, at least for one coat, which was all I did. I commented that it was a delight to find a really smooth paper that was easy to coat (Arches bright white, unlike most other HP watercolor papers, is a real PITA to coat evenly, though I love the smoothness of its tones once printed) and that the speed of drying was a big plus, in addition to the price. I never took it any farther than that, myself, and now that I want to, I can't find any masa in my flat file. Grr. By the way, as a general note (file under "do as I say, not as I do") I would caution people to always write in pencil at the edge of odd papers you might accumulate over the years, what they are, if it's not evident from a watermark. Going through my flat file today, I've found any number of one-sheet-of-a-kind papers that I have no idea what they are. Katharine
|