Judy says:
>.Terry, in the States a mortar & pestle is not the same as a ball mill. I
>think many of us find it easier to mix gum and dry pigment in a mortar
>.and pestle, though I gather you do this with muller or knife on glass.
Judy
I keep a stone mortar and pestle for grinding spices and a wooden one for
pounding garlic. I use a china tea plate for mixing colours from the W & N tube
which tells me what depth of colour I am getting and using a palette knife to
mix the colour with the gum. I gave up using dry pigment, except for
Cornellisen's black, over twenty years ago because it does not work as well as
colour from the tube. As you know, gradation of colour and tone is very
important to me in my gum printing so the plate and palette knife serves me
best.
>Either way, at least as Mark Golden explained it to me, the result is
>dispersal of pigment particles evenly as possible into the gum.
I prefer to pay W & N to do it for me.
>Ball milling, on the other hand, does grind pigments finer, for better or
>worse, but that may be the one thing we can't accuse Mortensen of.
True but dry pigments and mortars and pestles are bad enough.
> As for
>the "preciosity" of his images -- I find his girlies preferable to
>Weston's girlies, in that they are more honest -- but I've said that
>before (& I realize that's another list).
The difficulty is that one's opinions tend to relate to the images that one sees
or notices most often. But that subject may be an improvement on what happens
on another list.
Terry