Re: Sizing papers

Scott Wainer wrote:
>
> Yup, Arches Aquarelle. I also tried the cold water soak with DS Lenox and
> both papers were worthless without 2 coats of additional sizing.

Yes, as I said in that earlier discussion, while I had no reason to
doubt that this worked for the guy who was cited as claiming this, I
doubted it would work for all papers.

Arches Aquarelle used to be a wonderful gum printing paper; for years I
printed all my tricolors on it with no shrinking or sizing whatever, and
no staining or speckling whatever, but those days are gone forever,
apparently.

I hope someone will take me up on the idea of sizing with
glyoxal-hardened gum, because I'd like to see how that works for other
people.

But I may need to tinker with the proportions some more. I left one
sheet of gum-sized paper, pigmented so that I could tell if the gum was
there or not, in water for a day and the gum did dissolve sometime
during that time, leaving clean white paper in its wake. So perhaps
more glyoxal is in order, if the size is to survive through long long
soaks.
Katharine

Even then
> the lenox was much better to coat with gum. On the off chance that they
> might be good for something, I tried both without additional sizing with
> cyanotype and kallitype. What a waste; hard to coat evenly, took 4x the
> amount of sensitizer, and printed flat and dull. I tried again with
> additional sizing and got good Dmax and great contrast from the Lenox and
> slightly less so with the Aquarelle; so from now on i'm sizing all of my
> papers regardless of hot or cold preshrink. BTW, I didn't notice any
> difference between using a hot or cold preshrink except my fingers fared
> better with the cold. I just cold preshrunk Fabriano Uno and Coventry Rag (2
> 1/2 hour soaks at 70F), so i'll see how the work over the next week. I was
> thinking about shrinking some Strathmore Drawing Bristol 1 ply Plate but I
> don't think it'll hold up to more than 1 soak.
>
> Best, Scott
>
> swphoto@verizon.net
>
> > I can't speak to the general question of cold water presoak, as I said
> > earlier, but in that discussion I did say that I didn't think cold
> > soaking would improve a paper that prints badly unsized, of which
> > Aquarelle, if by which you mean Arches Aquarelle, is exhibit A.
> > kt
> >
Received on Mon May 30 15:24:54 2005