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PAW 1 : Adventures in alternative printing... |
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Tuesday, 04 January 2005 |
Or : A rose by any other name would be an oil print...
Ok, I feel like I'm already cheating on my new year's resolution by putting up an old image as first for my picture-a-week. So I'm giving you this oilprint to make up for it.
Oilprints are very very simple, in theory. They are based on the simple capacity of bichromate to harden gelatin when exposed to light. So basically to give a sheet of watercolor paper a coat of gelatin, soak it in bichromate, and put a negative on it. You leave it out in the sun for a while, and you rince the bichromate out of the unhardened gelatin.
What you get is a matrix of free-gelatin and bichromate-hardened gelatin that won't take up water at the same rate. So by soaking the paper in water, the un-hardened gelatin takes up water and swells. The next step sound simple : you take an oil based-pigment, and you apply it to the wet print. The hardened areas take the pigment, the water-soaked areas don't.
Simple isn't it ?
The image you see here is my 6th attempt at this same image, the first two ended up in the rubbish, no questions asked, i then had to change paper, and i'll have to change pigment for my next attempt. I'm still far from what can be acheived with the process, i'll try to post my next attempts with the same image so you can see how far this process goes...
To see more oilprints, and other bichromate techniques, take a look here at Philippe Berger's website. He's a belgian photographer who creates guidebooks for different alternative processes, with one distinctive characteristic : he includes a finished print with the printed guide so a newbie can have a starting "aiming" point.
Good, now I feel better about my first PAW week...
{mosgoogle} |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 06 November 2005 )
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