Re: (Gum) Tonal scale

On Dec 8, 2005, at 3:04 PM, Katharine Thayer wrote:

> 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.

In other words, when I distinguished between those who print opaquely
and those who print transparently (a distinction, BTW, which is much
less apparent now than it was when I wrote those words, because
nowadays people are printing not just those two ways but a lot of
different ways, which makes me very happy, and this distinction
probably will not survive the next revision of my site) I was NOT
making a distinction between people who print in dark tones and people
who print in transparent tones, since such a distinction in terms of
opacity/transparency simply doesn't make sense. When I made the
distinction, I was simply saying that opaque pigments have one look
(opaque) and transparent pigments have another (transparent) and people
tend to have a preference for one look or the other. But opaque does
not mean dark tone and transparent does not mean light tone, as I hope
most people understand by now.

  I've meant for a long time to make a visual that shows the same image
printed in tricolor two ways: one in opaque pigments and one in
transparent pigments, to show this distinction for those who have
trouble with it. But there are many things on my list of things I mean
to do someday, and I can't say when I'll get them all done, if ever.
Maybe Chris will do that print she was talking about with cerulean and
red oxide and nickel titanate, and then I won't have to.
Katharine

>
> 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 22:45:23 2005