Re: lemon juice and gum printing, other questions

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From: Jack Brubaker (jack@jackbrubaker.com)
Date: 07/05/03-12:44:49 PM Z


Judy, I think you touch on the most basic reason I gum print. It has a
character that I like. I am delighted there are folks out there fussing with
untold variables but I find that varying paper, AM concentration, piment,
developement times and method, exposer and layers gives me more that enough
choices (too many most of the time) to get what I want. I am tempted to try
some others now and then but life is short and the time hard to find. I am
curious about the Berger method since it tempts us with the oppertuinity to
avoid so many pitfalls but it requires so much preplanning - and that is why
I quit silver printing. If I want real control of my print I'll just
photoshop it and print it with the Epson. I do look forward to finding the
time to try the method of sensitizing the paper and then applying gum and
pigment. But can one do multiple layers then? It would not seem likely that
the paper would take the bichromate evenly over the the first image... Any
trials of this out there?

I would not know of some of these posibliities without the references to
them on the list and I thank you all for that input. If some day there is a
silver bullet found that takes away the risks and complexities of the
variables in gum I fear it would also take the fun out of it for me. But I'm
not depending on gum prints for my living. If I were I might be... I don't
know what that would do to my thinking.

By the way I sell my iron work at at few oudoor art fairs each summer and
have run into a young woman named Siouxsan E. Miller who is making a living
selling gum over cyano. She learned the basics from a class at the Detroit
Art Inst. Her work is all public domain images from old catalogs and such.
She jokes about not owning a camera. See her at www.siouxsan.com

> From: Judy Seigel <jseigel@panix.com>
> Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
> Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 01:58:35 -0400 (EDT)
> To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
> Subject: Re: lemon juice and gum printing, other questions
>
>
>
> On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Jack Brubaker wrote:
>
>> in the past people used other bichromates. So people go off expressing their
>> individuality by trying and making claims for other sensitizers. The old
>> literature is full of half-cocked ideas written by semiliterates who want us
>> to believe how important their work is when it seems their only real claim
>> is that they did it differently. But since they can't write we aren't even
>> sure of that. And since the art of printing did not afford them the chance
>> to illustrate their writing with meaningfull illustrations we cant tell from
>> the images.
>
>
> This has been exactly my experience... I've tried every miracle cockamamie
> additive & "trick' in the old literature, of which I have a fair range.
> Some do nothing at all, some screw up the print, and others just change
> the speed somewhat sometimes... but the print character remains the same.
>
> J.


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