Re: fun with tricolor gum

Sorry, I was tidying up on the website while I was there and
apparently deleted the thing I'd just uploaded, thinking it was
something else. I really need to establish a better convention for
naming things so that doesn't happen. But I did say it wasn't going
to be there long :-)

My point in showing these outtakes, aside from sharing the joy of
having fun with tricolor again, and to suggest that anyone seriously
interested in tricolor might spend some time printing this test
image, was to show that just dinking around with unfamiliar pigments,
you can get within shouting distance of a color print, and from there
it's just a matter of adjusting the pigment concentrations to get a
better balanced print. Before I re-uploaded the page I added the
first print I did in this series (middle lower row) which was the
precursor to print (A). When I mixed the pthalo gouache, I was
thinking about something else and absentmindedly dumped in way too
much paint, as much as I would for a sort of regular pigment, which
is way too much for pthalo, as can be seen in the finished print.
Print (B) is the first attempt at the fairly unfamiliar transparent
pigments and no doubt the second attempt will be closer to a good
balance, as was (A).

One thing I realized as a result of turning everything upside down
from my usual practice, was how much I rely on printing the cyan
last, for getting the print right (assuming the cyan is properly
pigmented in the first place). Printing it first, I can't tell til
I've printed the whole print whether it's right or not, (the cyan
layer for that middle lower print looked great by itself, but was
obviously too dark for tricolor) but printing it last, one can
adjust the development to make it come out perfectly. This is because
the cyan separation contains a large part of the "density" and
contrast of the total print.

I also think that I'll probably stick with Pictorico for separations,
and just adjust the exposure and possibly the curve to deepen the
print. What's amazing, when you think about it, is that so many
variables affect how a tricolor prints (the pigments, the
concentrations of the pigments relative to each other, the curve, the
transparency material, etc etc, not to speak of the gum, the paper,
the light) and yet it's not that hard, as Chris said the other day,
to get a print that "works" in a kind of general way, just using a
sort of arbitrary choice of pigment concentration.

http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/tricolorfun.html

Katharine

On Jan 6, 2006, at 1:36 AM, Breukel, C. (HKG) wrote:

>
> Katherine:
>
> Very interesting post, but unfortunately I cannot open below page..
> "Page cannot be found"..
>
> Best,
>
> Cor
>
>>
>> http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/tricolorfun.html
>>
>> Katharine
>
Received on Fri Jan 6 14:26:55 2006