Re: my pigment dilutions
Sorry, Loris, I'm not understanding what you're doing here at all, or more accurately, I think I understand what you're doing, but not what you think you're learning by it. If I'm understanding correctly, it looks like what you've done here is squeeze paint out of tubes in an attempt to mix black from three colors. It's not necessary to use three colors to create black with paint. Painters mix black all the time with two colors; handprint has a whole page listing pairs of complementary colors that mix to neutral black. Three colors are even easier to mix to black; a wide variety of combinations of three colors will mix to black right out of the tube, or even at tricolor concentrations. Since these three pigments are approximately equidistant on the color wheel, one would expect them to mix to black, as explained by handprint, so it's hardly a great surprise that they do. Whether the pigments add to black is a question of their hue and where their hues stand in relation to each other on the color wheel; the question of whether the yellow can hold its own with the other pigments isn't so much about whether it can add to black, but how it mixes with the other colors to form secondary and tertiary colors, and how the greys look, and while that does depend partly on hue, it's also dependent on pigment strength, value, and other variables. It's the value (lightness) and pigment strength of PY 151 that makes me say that for the kind of printing I do, I don't feel that it holds its own with other colors at the concentrations I like to use them. But that's just me; I'm not trying to talk you out of using it. All I was saying is that PY 151 is very different from PY175, so it might not be useful to go by Chris's proportions. That's all. I thought you were going to calibrate your three pigments at tricolor concentrations, then print overlaid step prints and see if that gives you neutral greys and blacks. That would tell you something about the neutral balance of the pigments in the relevant concentration ranges, but not so much about the color palette; you have to print colors for that. (Yes, the two variables overlap, but they aren't identical). But what you've done here doesn't tell me much of anything at all, sorry. Being an old-fashioned gal who was printing tricolor a long time before it got so gol-darn complicated, I'd personally recommend just throwing caution to the winds and printing tricolor. Most people who just print tricolor without all the calibrating and testing and fussing and esoterica find that it doesn't take more than two or three tries to get it right (I got the right combination on my second try) and then you can just print. But, each to his own. Katharine On Oct 25, 2008, at 3:50 PM, Loris Medici wrote: Katharine, see below:
|
