Re: (Gum) Tonal scale

On Dec 7, 2005, at 11:08 AM, Tom Sobota wrote:
> The problems of opacity and transparency of pigments are not unknown
> to me. They are also not unique to gum printing but are relevant to
> carbon and of course the whole printing industry.
>
> This said, of course I have visited your web pages. I enjoyed very
> much (and learned from) the pigments discussion, which is uncommonly
> informative.
>
> I started doing monochrome gums, and did them for a long time. Only
> very recently I started to experiment in trichromy, and my choice of
> phthalo blue came, if I'm not mistaken, after reading your material.
> If not in your pages, certainly on the list. For you it might be too
> 'garish', as you say, but for me it is perfect. I'm one of those
> 'opaque tone printers' as you define them :-)

?? I was trying to make my way through the underbrush of this
discussion, looking for a specific quote, when I came across this last
sentence above, which I hadn't noticed before, and which puzzles me.

  I have said that there are people who prefer transparent pigments, and
people who prefer opaque pigments, but it seems quite unlikely that
I've ever used the label "opaque tone printers" to define a group of
gum printers. At any rate, it should be clear from my site and my
discussions here that the choice of transparent or opaque pigments
isn't related to tonal scale; in other words people who print opaquely
aren't printing darker than those who print transparently, they are
just choosing a different kind of pigment to print whatever tonal scale
they print. Maybe you're using the word "tone" in a way that's not
familiar to me; at any rate, this isn't a phrase I would use, since I
don't even understand it.

And since pthalo is a transparent pigment, explaining your choice of it
by your self-identification as "one of those 'opaque tone printers''"
makes no sense either. So there's nothing about this sentence that I
understand.

Pthalo in and of itself isn't a particularly garish color; I just don't
like it for tricolor landscapes because the greens it makes seem
unnatural to me. But I've used it and enjoyed it for other images, like
the apricot still life, and as I've said probably a million times by
now, each to his own.
Katharine
Received on Thu Dec 8 13:20:26 2005