Re: (Gum) Tonal scale

Katherine,

Yesterday you said were very weary of the discussion we were
having, so I more or less cut it short so as not to cause you
further distress. So I were perhaps not too careful about exact meaning.

The 'opaque tone printers' thing was just a shorter version of your
'people who prefer opaque pigments'. Of course you never said it, it
was me who did. Wrongly, because I should have said 'dark tone printers'.

I know that phthalo blue is a transparent pigment, I told you I use
it. But I don't use it alone. When applied together with several
layers of other pigments, the end result can be pretty opaque,
believe me. Also dark.

But now it is me who is weary of this discussion. I have the feeling
that it is drifting out of control.

BTW I still don't know the answer to my last question to you.

Tom

At 20:19 08/12/2005, you wrote:

>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 15:14:45 2005