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liquid emulsion on aluminum
Is liquid emulsion on aluminum alt process enough? Oh well, here
goes--thought I would share my results with you.
I tried several different kinds of emulsions--Liquid Light, Silverprint,
and one by the Photographer's Formulary. When I first did the aluminum I
hand sanded it, did not varnish, and applied the emulsion and it waved right
off; it was quite fragile. I thought it was because it was not hard
enough/dry enough so I waited a week and exposed it. It was better but
still tenuous. Then I tried the Ph F brand with added hardener and had
pretty good luck with it on hand sanded, varnished aluminum.
But the real luck was with aluminum that I sanded with a random orbital
sander (quick and easy), then used a wonderfully creamy thick oil based
varnish, MATTE, by Benjamin Moore paints; I taped the area off that I was to
expose in with painter's masking tape, varnished it, let it dry and then
coated it with Silverprint, let it dry only two or three hours, exposed it,
and it didn't budge. I sprinkled gold powdered pigment into the varnish,
too, but prefer the more brilliant effect that straight aluminum gave. When
the image was done being washed I just peeled the tape off and had straight
edges. I peeled while wet and while dry to see if the emulsion would be
fragile either way, and it seemed better to wait til it was dry but even
wet, the emulsion did not lift with the tape.
The nice thing about aluminum is that if you don't like what you've
done, you just have to put the thingy in a bath of hot water and easily
brush off the image. You still have your varnished base and can go at it
again. Just think, you could mount a show of a set of images, take the show
down, wipe off the emulsion and mount a whole different show. Lends new
meaning to the term archival.
The variable contrast emulsions are plenty dark and contrasty, too. My
experience is that Liquid Light is too slow. The others are faster and
basically approximate warmtone paper in speed. I test strip with warmtone
paper, and make sure to give the aluminum exposure a bit more time because
you want a tad more detail in your whites so that they even show, being that
you don't have white as your base. I would also suggest a tad lowering of
contrast, unless you want a more graphic and less detailed image.
The even nicer thing is that you can coat your surface long before you
expose it; put it in lightsafe black plastic and it will keep fine. Watch
the sharp edges on aluminum so that they don't cut through the bag. I
sanded mine.
Question--is there a source for large black plastic lightsafe bags?
Chris