Re: Gum hardening: top down?

Katherine,

Was the image you printed on mylar on the frosted mylar? Did you do anything
else to prepare the mylar for the gum? Any sub coating?

Jack

> From: Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>
> Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca
> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 12:26:57 -0700
> To: alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca
> Subject: Re: Gum hardening: top down?
>
> P.S. I kind of like the melting softness that's achieved by printing
> through the back of the mylar.
> kt
>
>
> On Apr 10, 2006, at 11:33 AM, Katharine Thayer wrote:
>
>> Okay, I've coated a very thick, very heavily-pigmented gum emulsion
>> on mylar and printed it from the front and from the back. A couple
>> of comments before I give you the URL:
>>
>> (1) though the emulsion was very heavily pigmented, two things
>> resulted in not a very deep DMax: (a) the fact that I used ivory
>> black, a transparent pigment (if I were to do it again, I'd use
>> lamp black) and (b) the fact that it's printed on a transparent
>> material and was scanned as a transparency, with the light shining
>> through it. But the thing to note is, be that as it may, the DMax
>> is about the same in both prints.
>>
>> (2) there's a light brown pigment stain (ivory black is a brownish
>> black) in both prints that is probably a function of the heavy
>> pigmentation. It hardly shows in the prints themselves, but for
>> some reason was accentuated in the scanning.
>>
>> (3) I don't honestly know what to make of the results. If you look
>> just at the prints on mylar, you'd have to conclude that back-
>> printing is much superior to front-printing, at least for a thick
>> coat on mylar. But if you compare the back-printed print on mylar
>> to the regular front-printed gum print (using a less heavily-
>> pigmented emulsion) on paper (at the bottom of the page), it's hard
>> to claim that the back-printed print is superior. But since they
>> are on different materials, it's apples and oranges.
>>
>> So I guess if I were forced to draw a conclusion from this rather
>> inconclusive test, I'd say that if you are going to print on mylar
>> using a very thick and heavily pigmented emulsion, then you'll
>> probably do better printing from the back. But if you're printing
>> on paper, you can get fine results printing from the front with a
>> less pigmented emulsion.
>>
>> http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/topdown.html
>>
>> Katharine
>>
>>
>
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 10 15:02:46 2006