Re: color accuracy in gum bichromate

Good morning,
     How nice to see such list traffic after a very quiet spell.

     I wanted to offer my two cents about accurate gum color.

     Livick's print in Scopick's book was the first gum print I ever saw
that looked accurate instead of interpretive. I remember being blown away.
I couldn't believe anyone could get that kind of color with gum. I was only
doing BW negs and using a neg over and over again to approximate color at
that time.

     I didn't want to go the imagesetter route because it was so expensive.
It was not until this last year and a half that I returned to shooting in
color (digitally) and bought the Epson 2200. That, coupled with seeing the
accurate flesh tones, etc., in Sam Wang's prints at APIS made me take the
plunge into a "true" color print with RGB negatives. It has been a blast,
and very addictive. This is why I think gum's time has arrived. Technology
has made it easily possible for a home user to get accurate color in gum.

     Then, what I found, is that when I showed those normallly colored
prints to people, they would just "uh huh" them as if they were digital
color prints! They had NO idea it took 3 days to do them. No clue. This is
one of the reasons I have offered to do a gum demo at my thesis exhibition.

     So, being able to do this color perfect thing aside, my goal is back to
interpretive color, at Prof Wang's continual urging besides (I'm finally
listening).

     Oddly enough, the images I have in the traveling portfolio are really
true to color. The house was that yukky pale swimming pool green. The
Aiken-Rhett window was that golden aged color, in an old, unfinished
mansion. etc.

     I printed this week some BW negs again, and realized why this tricolor
way even with interpretive color is so much better. With one neg you print
over and over on top of the color below and you get a totally different look
to the image than with the separations. I've been printing a cyanotype
layer on top of completed gum prints as of late, and it really doesn't look
very good on top of a gum from a BW, but from a tricolor sep it looks verrry
cool, especially when it blobs up into spots and drips.

     The end,
Chris
 
Received on Mon Nov 1 08:26:39 2004