Blogging for Thor: Luminous Chroma

My best chromo-lumen!

Hello spiders! It's 4 AM and I'm really tired. You're not, I know, because you're just bundles of code scattered through a series of tubes. Whatever. You don't understand me, spiders. But you get me, you know? I love you, spiders.

So anyway. As you know, I love lumen prints and recently I've been experimenting with the chromoskedasic sabatier technique. Oh, actually I just reviewed the blog to provide a link to me talking about chromo (so much shorter to call it that), but didn't find anything. So you don't know that I've been experimenting with that process! I'll have to devote a blog to talking about it! Cool. Anyway, I totally have been doing that. And lumens. Back at SPESE 2013, when I was taking Angela Wells' great workshop on chromo, I asked her if she'd even combined the technique with lumen printing. She had not, since she had not heard of lumen printing. Another guy there, Joshua White who teaches up at App State, is very much into lumens but was just learning about chromo and had never combined them. I did some research online and I can't find any results of anyone that does combine the techniques.

I like the contrast!

Anyone except me! WOO. Turns out you totally can combine them. All you need to do is take a lumen print, dip it in very dilute developer (or it'll just vanish because lumens are massively overexposed by their nature) for a few seconds, wash it off in water and then proceed to chromo all over it as normal. It turns out pretty awesome, actually. I find that it's a great way to add visual interest to empty areas of a lumen print, creating a much more dynamic figure-ground relationship than most lumens tend to have. It also brings more of a personal, organic touch to the lumen process. There is a lot of potential to explore, especially for artists that have fine manual dexterity and some skill at painting. Chromo is basically painting with chemistry, so this combination of techniques can effectively be used as a very alchemical form of hand-coloring. Hand-coloring with metallic deposit precipitation. The best kind of hand-painting, obviously.

The puke-green is actually
oil-on-water shiny metal.

I'll be updating my Chromo-Lumen Flickr Gallery with future images for you lovely spiders (and any humans, lovely or not) to check out. So far I just have four, but I have a lot of boring lumens to attack with this technique!

My only regret is that chromo prints still need to be fixed. Just like lumens, they lose a great deal of saturation and vibrance when fixed, but it's pretty much necessary. As I lament in my last post, the intensely reflective, metallic nature of chromo prints just can't be scanned or photographed. It needs to be seen physically. That means the print needs to be the final product, not a digital reproduction, and that... means fixing the prints. Le suck, but what can you do?