Re: (Gum) Tonal scale

On Dec 8, 2005, at 1:13 PM, Tom Sobota wrote:

> Katherine,
>
>
> 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'.

Which makes even less sense, especially if I'm still meant to be the
source of the idea. I do distinguish between opaque and transparent
pigments, but I do not relate those qualities to tone, because in gum
printing the qualities of opacity and transparency are not related to
tone, as I've made abundantly clear on my site and in previous
discussions here, and as Joe spelled out in his proposal for the use of
terms, and as I said just now in clarifying why I was objecting to the
phrase 'opaque tone printers' being attributed to me.

  It's true that several layers of transparent pigments can make a very
dark combined color (pthalo plus a rich transparent red and a deep
transparent yellow can make a very black black) but being dark doesn't
mean it is opaque. As I show on my pigment page, both ivory black and
lamp black can both print dark enough to be called "100% black" by
Photoshop, but ivory black is transparent while lamp black is opaque.
(Note: I am using these terms in accordance with the "Joe conventions"
for using the terms opacity and transparency in gum printing, and it's
your use of these terms to mean something different that IMO is
confusing the discussion.).

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

I don't know what that was, and since posts were coming in random order
for a few days there, I don't have any idea what your last question
might have been, or even if I received it. As far as I know, I
responded in full and ample redundancy to all the issues I saw
addressed to me. If there's still a question that feel hasn't been
answered, you'll need to ask it again, sorry.
Katharine

>
> 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 17:05:41 2005