[alt-photo] Re: Sizing

[Johnny Brian]

Thanks for all of the feedback. With the Fabriano I didn't size but only shrank the paper. I hung the paper on the short side with 2 clothes pins in the basement area where I work which is usually (now) 60F and 40RH. There is a lot of air circulation sometimes due to the central heat air return, and the paper can dry (to touch) in less than an hour. I've also shrunk Arches Platine, Lana and Stonehenge and none of them curled up. Don't know what was so different with the Fabraino. I've got about 20 sheets that I shrunk that I put under some weights (4 cinder blocks) for a few days but it didn't flatten the paper much. I put the paper back and it's been there a couple of weeks now so maybe it will be flat when I take it out. I though that I should shrink the paper as when I tried printing an 8x10 image on a 11x15 sheet of Arches for the second time without shrinking, I couldn't get the image to come back into full registration - it was off 0.5 to 1 mm. The unsized Arches doesn't stain per se but when I printed the 2nd layer it appeared that some of the individual fibers had picked up color. Interestingly, when I look at the areas with a loupe, I can't see any color - maybe what I can see without the loupe is because the surface of the paper has been raised enough that I'm seen shadows or some optical effect that's not really pigment. 

Anyway, because I've got a lot of Arches with apparently bad sizing, I plan on resizing it with gelatin and gluteraldehyde. I don't want to use formaldehyde at home. One of my other longer term goals is to learn to carbon print, and I presume for carbon, the paper has to be sized with gelatin, and that PVA won't work. dont' mind the extra work with sizing. 

I've been printing mostly black (and a a few brown) images. The B&S kit came with Senneler colors so that's mostly what I've used. The Senneler lamp black doesn't stain at all but it's not very dark. I tried with Daniel Smith lamp black, and an equal weight of the Daniel Smith produces a deep black but stains badly (at 0.25 g + 3ml gum + 3ml dichromate on unsized paper). I also performed a few stain tests where I made solutions of pigment, gum and either dichromate or an equal volume of water to keep the pigment concentration constant, and painted the solutions on paper. Once dry, I "developed" the paper  as usual (30 min in water) and I would have thought that all would have washed out but the dichromate solutions didn't wash out well - even when the same solution washed out after an exposure. I didn't quite understand why. The solutions without dichromate washed out to variable degrees depending on the pigment and the paper. 

Thanks again,
Johnny Brian