Blogging for Thor: Lumen 150!

Today I printed my 150th lumen. Well, at least my 150th lumen. I'm not exactly sure, because I made some tests that just didn't come out, or I did demos and never recorded them. However I've now made at least 150 lumens and have 150 in my archives. So that's a pretty big milestone. I might not be able to match the thousands of John Fobes, who has two different Flickr galleries because he hit a hard cap on one gallery! Still, I'm pretty happy with hitting 150.

These are two more of my lumen prints using Liquid Light painted onto parchment.  I even have a sheet of black parchment that I originally didn't think I'd have any use for. You can't print a cyanotype or anthotype on black, so I didn't think there'd be anything to do with it. I'm really excited to see what comes out, I'm just looking for a good leaf to use.

Coating still presents a problem, because even multiple thin layers are still showing considerable bubbles and streaking. Fresh foam brush and everything, working from a completely liquified emulsion, but still not a smooth coat. I'm not sure if that's simply a result of applying the emulsion to parchment, but I think it's just me being bad at coating. Hopefully my coatings will improve with practice. Despite the bad coating, I did get photographic-level detail on Lumen 149. Check it out!

I am a little sad that these thicker coats also seem to result in darker, blander backgrounds. I'm gunna do some experimenting, but the backgrounds turned this violet-black color almost instantly upon exposure to the sun. None of the cloudy cyan-lilac-pinks that showed up when doing quick exposures on single-coated vellum.