[alt-photo] Re: Sizing

[Christina Anderson]

Johnny,
Curling I have seen LOTS of. I live in an incredibly dry climate (are you, too?) and the curling happens when I have a few layers of gum on the print. I solved the problem (since I do my gum printing at home and do not have a dry mount press) by ironing (yep) my print on my kitchen counter on the back side, face down. It works great to tame the beast. Another thing I do is I hang my prints to dry with hangers, kiddie hangers from Walmart with two clothespins, and then I also hang another hanger on the bottom of the print to keep the print from curling.

However, if I tray sized so both sides of the paper were sized, the curling greatly diminished.

As far as not sizing--I tried that for about 6 months and there were two things I noticed: veiling of the highlights with a slight color which created  a lower contrast print overall. It did not work for me as well as sizing. When I finally bit the bullet and began sizing it was sooo much easier to gum print. Sam Wang never sizes and does great work so not sizing all depends on practice. But if there is ever a paper that you can get by without sizing, it is Fabriano Artistico.

As far as yellowing, I think our own Marek Matusz on this list found that if too much glyoxal (or glut) is used per batch of gelatin, both will yellow. If you do a list serv search on his name and yellowing I bet you will find the lengthy conversation on that several years ago. Yellowing of glyoxal plagued me as did the scratchiness of it and I abandoned it. OH, another factor can be alkalinity of the water. 

I've had my head so far into the experimental b&w clouds for these last few months, it is refreshing to return to a gum discussion.

OH, btw, I would suggest sizing the opposite side of the paper to be on the safe side and compare apples to apples. Both sides of Fabriano hot press are just fine to use.

Chris

Christina Z. Anderson
christinaZanderson.com

On Dec 8, 2011, at 4:29 AM, Johnny Brian wrote:

> Thanks for everyones feedback. I'll try resizing the paper with gelatin and gluteraldehyde. I used the glyoxal because it came in the B&S kit. The gelatin/glyoxal does seem to slightly yellow the paper. I've also tried printing on Fabriano paper, but (for me) once it's wet it curls up like a potato chip and I can't flatten it enough for printing. I've also printed on Stonehenge and Lana in addition to the Arches and none of these curl like the Fabriano. 
> Johnny Brian
> _______________________________________________
> Alt-photo-process-list | http://altphotolist.org/listinfo