Sizing

There are a lot of variables in gum printing, a lot of ways to manipulate your final image. Some serve to benefit the finished print and some do not. Controlling those variables is one of the keys to good printing. The one that starts the ball rolling one way or the other is sizing.

Sadly, frustratingly, it’s also been the most confounding over the years. How well I’ve done these past couple of weeks will have everything to do with the quality of my prints in the coming year.

Sizing doesn’t mean measuring the paper. It means preparing the surface of the paper before printing on it. Most gum prints, including all of mine, are made on paper designed for print makers and watercolorists. Using those papers un-sized, the image will sink into the fibers of the paper. Staining becomes a real issue as well.

A properly sized paper keeps the image and all its detail on the surface of the paper and prevents staining as well. Even factory-made, store-bought paper is sized. Starch, egg whites, and gelatin are the most common materials used. But for the gum process, which tends to be pretty rough on paper, only gelatin is hard enough to withstand the abuse.

Sizing isn’t that great a job. More like a necessary evil.

With print side up, the paper is drawn carefully over the top edge of the vat.

Once a year, in the summer, I mix up 2 pounds of gelatin powder in 8 gallons of distilled water and heat to 125 degrees. Then 48 sheets of 22” x 30” paper are inserted into the bath and then removed from the bath and hung to dry. (The screen porch allows 6 rows by eight sheets, 48 in all.)

That process is repeated two more times on subsequent days depending on the weather and other circumstances. On the last day, 37% formaldehyde is added to a more diluted gelatin bath to harden the surface of the paper further and protect it from growing tiny life forms.

A gas mask is used on formaldehyde day.

All of that usually takes three or four days but I’m sizing a little more than twice as much as usual this year and that has really stretched the time uncomfortably close to Autumn. I had hoped it would all be done by now but the weather turned on me a couple of days ago. It has been a little too breezy and cool but tomorrow is supposed to be a little warmer.

Gelatin left in the vat overnight and scooped into the cooking pot.

See my website:  woodsedge.net

More of the Beguiling

Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon, 1888

Gauguin's painting has been in my thoughts these past few weeks.

When I bought my first camera more than 30 years ago, it was because of an intense desire to photograph the world around me. Ironically, the more involved I got in the art of photography, the less time I actually spent photographing and the more time I spent printing photographs in the darkroom. That was true printing black and whites and even more so now as a gummist. 

It just takes a fraction of a second to photograph an image that subsequently takes weeks or months to turn into a finished gum print. There’s a dynamic tension there that I’ve mostly learned to live with over the years. But the negative-making process that has me tied in knots these days is of a different order entirely. 

Less dynamic and more painstaking. Instead of deciding which pigment to brush onto the next layer of a print and then waiting for it to print out, I’m sitting at the computer adjusting printer scripts. The script sends directions from the computer to the printer and those directions subsequently effect every aspect of the inkjet negative that will then be used in the darkroom. 

Printers come with their own scripts that come with the printer driver that you download with the purchase of a new printer. You find them in the printer window under Printer Profile when you choose your printer and the medium you'll be printing on (glossy, matte, canvas etc). Needless to say, "gum negative" is not an option. And the Epson driver is not built to be tweeked; rather, to be accepted as is. QuadTone RIP, on the other hand, is an independent driver that allows the user to go into the script and rewrite gamma, boost, ink levels and more to match your particular needs.

But in order to find out if a given script is the grail I seek, I have to run it through the lengthy gum process. Which means, even if I stick with it, it might be a week or more after I print a negative before I find out if the new script change is what I'm looking for. It may be a fool’s errand. 

Unlike platinum printing, for example, which calls for a very specific and fairly narrow range of printing prescriptions, gum is all over the place. It’s so personalized and loosy-goosy in methodology that there may not be a prescription that will ever do the trick. I may be chasing a phantom. But I firmly believe that the road to 19th century hands-on photography now runs through the computer and making the best negative possible has always been the first goal of the photographer so I persist as I wrestle my demons and my angels.

See my website:  woodsedge.net