Re: Tip for color assessment in multiple gums

Katharine Thayer wrote:
>

> Anyway, last night I dreamed a way of judging how colors will look
> printed over each other without actually having to do the printing, and
> today I tried what I dreamed and found that it works pretty well. I
> coated small sheets of mylar with dichromated pigment-gum and exposed
> and developed them. Now I have these pigmented overlays that I can lay
> over a partially-finished gum print to see how that color would look as
> the next layer in the print. This is especially useful when I want to
> build a neutral color by printing colors over each other.

An example to illustrate the point: starting with a blue first layer, I
found that quinacridone gold (PO 49) over this blue would yield green,
but "deep quinacridone gold," a darker version of PO 49 which didn't
seem all that different in hue, yielded a lovely charcoal grey when laid
over the blue. This seems somewhat counterintuitive, but it was so.

To my eye, creating neutrals by overlaying colors gives a depth and
richness to the color that you simply wouldn't get by just printing
diluted black to make grey, or even by mixing complements in one
printing. In tricolor, you get neutrals naturally wherever there are
equal amounts of all three colors, if you choose the right primaries,
but I'm working with duochromes just now and learning how to produce
different shades of greys using two colors -- pewters vs. silvers vs
pearly greys etc, for a project I'm working on. In this investigation,
the overlays are a tremendous help.
kt
Received on Fri Sep 2 22:44:05 2005