unhardened gelatin size for gum

Good morning all,

It's the weekend!

Ok ok so I bit on the deionized 250 bloom ossein gelatin.

Bought some on the recommendation that using this wonderful gelatin would
allow me to use it as a size unhardened for gum.

Don't bother.

I can't believe I am so gullible! When you logically think this one out,
you are painting a layer of pigmented dichromated gum on top of a nicely
receptive, juicy, soft, plump, layer of gelatin WAITING to be hardened.

So what happens? In my practice I produced a nicely stable, combined
gum/gelatin square of color. Duh.

Luckily I wasn't so gullible to size all 20 22x30 sheets of the stuff last
weekend this way. I only sized 2. So I will continue to test, side by
side, the remaining pieces of unhardened gelatin paper (while cursing) with
glut hardened gelatin paper a few more times to make sure I am not leaving
any stone unturned, but one print showed me that it does not work to prevent
staining, it slimes in the water, and it LOVES your pigment. A perfect
marriage.

I'm sure there are those out there who think this works swell, but for a
fully pigmented layer, it was vastly inferior. In other words, it didn't
prevent staining but actually increased it, and it appears that no sizing
would've done a better job, because I have worked on unsized Fabriano
Artistico before and it is somewhat adequate for one coat gums.

The only way I can surmise that this might work is if you wanted to do a
thinly pigmented fully tonal first layer for printing a pale overall image
in... and then you'd have that underneath layer of gelatin hardened by the
dichromate and protected by the hardened gum layer. With degraded
highlights.

I suppose that there are those gummists out there that think unhardened
gelatin is wonderful so chime in, but for this gummist it was a waste of my
time. Soon I will upload this wonderful side by side image to someone's
website along with my carbon black one coat tests.

I'm off--a whole poopload of nicely sized Fabriano awaits me :)
Chris
Received on Fri Apr 21 08:28:54 2006