Hopeful Update ~ Newest Gum Print

The war against electronic Demons invading my printer, then on to the laptop is over. I won. Sort of. New laptop and basically functioning printer once again. The toll on the nerves and personal constitution is an entirely different matter. Due to the fact that Mac and PC don't speak to each other, added to reality that the new OS doesn't talk to the old copy of Paintshop Pro x3, the flow-through process I have been using for preparing digital negatives is now completely different. It will take a few days to come up to speed with the new system using the new edition of Paintshop, before momentum will once again begin towards printing more palladium images.

Although the silver/palladium printing has been seriously affected by the above, I have been able to continue printing in gum, mostly because gums don't require a long density range, thereby making them so much easier to print. This gum print is the third printing of the image. A final coating error on the first attempt rendered it useless. The second attempt demonstrated that the approach I was using wasn't effective, as well as coming to better realize that the negative lacked sufficient density in the lower tonal areas to realize any detail in the image. When you haven't printed for thirty years, you tend to lose the intuitive aspect of the craft.

In the first two printing attempts, both had ten printing layers. This print was made using five color print layers, readjusting the color to gum ratio. That is, each color print layer of this print, was mixed with a much deeper saturation of color, on each layer.  The difference between the two mixtures being, a very sheer color mixture, just enough color to leave it's mark on the first two prints, as opposed to the color mixtures were taken just to the edge, where the mixture is almost opaque, just barely seeing light through the color when swirled  on the edge of the clear mixing vessel, with a light behind it. That is how I determine how much color to add to the gum mix.

There is a trade off of sorts, between thin and thicker mixes. Stacking very sheer color layers allows more good color control as well as allowing more light through all the layers, and that tends to leave the image with the affect of brilliant light. One down side is that it takes many more layers to achieve any texture or detail, compared to thicker mixtures. This print was made with five color print layers. The image was shot from my front yard in Eugene, Oregon around 1984. My two kids spent many hours in that tree, and on that swing. This image is also a softer looking image, one might say, in the pictorial tradition. I won't complain of that, I am an avid pictorialist.

Gum Dichromate Print
"The Swing" ~ Unique
Eugene, Oregon ~ 1984