yupo and gum

Hi All,
I've been away from the list for a while, but when I was visiting a
friend in the city last week she handed me the New York Times article
about the Steichen print that sold for 2.6million, so when I got home
I checked the archives to be sure this sale had been noted here,
which of course it was, and in the process of checking on that I
found a couple things to comment on, including Gord's question about
using yupo for gum.

I was experimentig with yupo for gum for about a year, and reported
some of those experiments here and showed some of the results, but I
don't know if they are still out there on my site, because I can't
remember what I named those pages.

At any rate, my own experience was that gum doesn't print well on
untreated yupo. It coated evenly enough, for me, with a brush, but it
didn't stick to the yupo reliably in the development stage. At best
the image stays on the paper, but runs and oozes, which can be an
interesting effect if you want to play around with experimental and
unpredictable results, but not very satisfactory if you don't; at
worst, the image simply disintegrates and floats off the support as a
result of lack of "tooth" to anchor it to the surface.

At someone's suggestion, I tried sizing the yupo with hardened
gelatin, and I posted the results of that experiment; the result was
worse than with just plain yupo; the hardened gum coat went "shloop"
off the yupo the minute it hit the water. As someone replying to
Gord's question noted, I did for a while try sanding the yupo
lightly, but I found that the coating soaked into the scratches made
by the sandpaper and left scratch marks in the print, so that didn't
prove satisfactory ultimately. After that, I tried putting some
artificial tooth on the yupo, as I do with glass, by coating it with
acrylic medium containing a very fine sand. This worked well for one
coat, or sometimes two, but more coats didn't work well because the
gum layered on top of each other tended to pull off the support for
some reason. And you don't get real fine detail because the sand
texture breaks up the image in the most detailed parts. At that
point I abandoned the yupo and went back to paper, since I had found
a very smooth paper that prints well (Arches bright white) which
achieved the goal I was trying to achieve, and I went ahead and did
the prints I wanted to print expressing the particular look I was
after at that time.
Katharine
Received on Thu Mar 9 13:42:30 2006