Re: My first VanDykes & questions

Loris

My conclusion after once enthusiastically filtering the 'sludge' from
vandyke solution some years ago, was not to do that again. I concluded that
I had filtered out some of the silver. On exposing the filter paper to
light, dark spots appeared and the paper went brown. I am pretty sure that
the filtered solution then printed poorly. I never did that again.

My experience of vandyke is that it is more sensitive to papers than
cyanotype for example. Experimenting with papers is probably the key. May I
suggest that you look to testing writing papers too - not just watercolour
papers, which may not work well. For example, I recently tried out a variety
of heavier Fabriano Artistico papers for cyanotype and the heavier the paper
got the worse the result was. The 160gsm or whatever it is worked the best.
It's also great for vandyke in my opinion.

I once found some paper (in an art paper shop admittedly) simply called
parchment (it didn't look much like parchment really) and it was about
100gsm and I bought it to try. It was the best paper I have ever used.
Gorgeous rich dark blues and browns, great detail, tone, contrast and
highlights. Absolutely fabulous. Of course, when I ran out of the paper
there was no more in the shop and that was when I found out that it was a
one-off batch from a paper mill somewhere. Sigh. Such is life I guess.

cheers
Catherine
Received on Fri Nov 14 12:03:51 2003