Blogging for Sol: Calves, Goats and Sheep, Oh My!

My new samples, as packaged by Pergamena. So thoughtful!

The lovely folks at Pergamena sent me my latest order of scrap parchment and they were willing to organize them by species. So I have plenty of small to medium rectangles of deer, goat, calf and sheep parchment. The nice thing is that with this fairly large sample size, I can now identify older pieces by their species. This will help me control variables in future experiments.

With these samples, I have been able to identify that, up to this point, I've been working primarily on goat and calf skin. Reviewing my prints up to this point it doesn't appear that I've had deer skin in my shipments. Let's talk about what each kind of skin is like!

	Calf: Clean and white, with small pores. Extremely similar to Goat, really. However, the notes that Pergamena provides on how to tell their species apart don't exactly match my experiences. I think my Sheep and Calf envelopes may have been swapped. Calf has a very nice surface, and so far seems to react well to washing, even with the "fat" wrinkles. They appear as slightly "off" streaks on the surface, only really showing up when I apply chemistry or wet the parchment. Sometimes the wrinkles form an interesting background to the image. I believe I've used Calf in the past without knowing it.
	Deer: All my pieces of deer parchment are two-faced, ranging from light tan to soft brown, with streaks of darker and lighter colors on the "skin" side. The opposite side is a light tan velvet surface. I've been printing on the velvet side, which gives my images a golden hue in the highlights. The skin side is too slick to apply chemistry evenly, though I may attempt to print on it anyway in the future. The texture there is very nice, and worth some experimentation. I had never used Deer until getting these samples; it is distinct enough to be positive about that.
	Goat: Appears clean and white, with large pores. The pores show up as "pebbles" on the surface of the skin. I believe most of my successful to-date have been on Goat parchment. It has a smooth, almost featureless surface on one side, and the characteristic pores on the opposite side. It depends on the piece which side is better for coating, but generally the pore side has more tooth and takes chemistry better.
	Sheep: Soft and white with a wrinkled, textured surface. However, the notes that Pergamena provides on how to tell their species apart are the opposite of my experiences. I think my Sheep and Calf envelopes may have been swapped. So far, my only confirmed experience with Sheep has not been positive. It reacted very poorly to water, despite having a lovely surface when dry. In the water, it became fatty and wrinkled heavily upon re-drying. It also dried significantly out of shape, probably due to the gummy consistency of the wet material.

Update: I no longer think that Calf and Sheep have been swapped. Both varieties do show the veining and wrinkling, but Sheep is more granular. It appears that only when wet does Sheep really cause issues. Since parchment is a natural material, I have to suppose that even the broad guidelines will have significant wiggle-room. Further testing may help verify, but it does appear that Sheep parchment reacts poorly to water, while Calf does not. Both display veins and fat wrinkles, but Sheep displays more pores. The appearance also varies depending on which side of the parchment you look at. Even Goat can appear fairly smooth when viewed on the "reverse" side.

Here's what Pergamena has to say about the differences!

Currently at Pergamena, we produce parchment on four different types of animal skin: goat, calf, deer, and sheep. The most telling difference between the parchments of these animals is the grain, or the outside surface which contains the hair follicles. Goat usually has a rough, almost crackly, pattern to it that resembles the surface of asphalt, and can have a lot of fairly noticeable scars and marks, due to the wear and tear the hide experiences during the animal's life. Calf has a much smoother, flatter surface characterized by the broad pattern of thick fat wrinkles and finer veins that spiderweb across the skin. Deer, being wild animals, have the most prominent display of scars, punctures, scrapes, and bites of all our skin types. Sheep have a very similar granular pattern to goat, but can usually be recognized by the smaller size of the "pebbles" in the grain.

That's all I've got for now, Spiders. I know my blog is late, but I wanted to do some tests on the new parchment. They're still drying, so the experiments will have to get posted later.