Chapter III · THE INKING-UP (continued 2)

Oil-Painting Style.—If it is desired to prepare portraits which resemble reproductions of oil paintings, one should proceed as follows: the head should be first inked in considerably deeper than it should appear in the final print; then, if the head is on a light background, it will appear vigorous, even if not much ink is used. If, however, the background is dark and heavy, the inked-up head will appear considerably lighter because of the contrast. For this style of work it is best to select a warm dark brown ink. When the head is finished, some very soft ink of the same shade should be placed very thickly in the corners and margins of the picture, and this should be worked from all sides towards the head, which naturally must not be touched with the soft ink. Finally the blending of the head with the background should be very carefully done. In the lower part of the portrait the clothing should blend into the background in a similar manner; only one must take care in making the negative that no light pieces of drapery or accessories are used, because they cannot be easily completely covered. Any lighter accents, which may be desired in the background, should be made by removing the ink with a clean brush. One may thus make the head stand out in a dark oval, or attain similar painting effects. Prints prepared in this way ought not to be defatted, as they then lose their similarity to oil paintings. They must be left to dry for several days, in a place free from dust, until the thickly-applied ink has hardened.

Night Pictures.—Twilight and night effects can be easily obtained from ordinary negatives by carefully swelling the bleached print so that the differences of relief existent in the print are only slightly brought out. Then the capacity of the lights and shadows for taking the ink is not so very different, and the gradation is shorter. A second possibility of obtaining the same effect is offered by using mainly soft ink, which, as is well known, adheres to a certain extent even in the high lights of the print; only the soft ink must be applied very carefully and thinly in the shadows, so that these do not become choked up with ink.

In this way one may make night pictures from daylight exposures, accurately corresponding in tone values to night exposures. Previous practice has been to use either underexposed negatives or overexposed prints for such effects; in both cases the night effects were gloomy, but false in tone values, and usually without details in the shadows. In bromoil printing the gradation can be shortened as described, without loss of drawing, and one can simulate perfectly the short scale and mysterious gloom of night. If the too dense sky of the negative cannot be sufficiently darkened by the use of soft ink, its inking should be postponed till the print is dry.

Prints with White Margins.—If it is desired to obtain bromoil prints with margins of the natural paper, the negative should be masked with clean-cut black safe-edges of lantern slide binding strips, or one may use a mask, and print or enlarge on a sheet of bromide paper large enough to leave unexposed margins of the desired width. In making enlargements the mask, cut out of rather thin card, should be pinned on the enlarging screen over the sheet of bromide paper. After bleaching such a print the tanned image will appear slightly depressed within a strongly swollen, white frame of less tanned gelatine. The inking is done without any attention being paid to this unprinted edge. In consequence of its strong relief this gelatine does not take any ink from the brush, or, at most, a mere trace. When the print is finished, the ink is easily wiped from the white margins by means of a damp cloth, which removes this ink with the greatest ease. The finished and dried print is enhanced in effect if a plate mark is impressed in this wide white margin.

The Swelled-Grain Image.—Coarse-grain printing in bromoil has previously depended on a very carefully determined relation between the degree of relief of the film and the consistency of the ink, which had to be so chosen that the ink was not very easily taken up by the film. If inking was then skilfully done, the structure of the face of the brush was visible to a certain extent all over the print and gave the effect of a more or less coarse and irregular-grained image. It was obviously necessary for the success of a print of this type that no portion of the image should be gone over several times with the brush, for, if this was done, the structure was obliterated and the spot in question became smooth. Since, also, the requirement that the degree of relief must be rather high for the chosen consistency of the ink could never be fulfilled by the shadows, since these always take the color easily, we often obtained an undesired smoothness of effect in the shadows. For this reason typical coarse-grain prints could not always be produced with certainty.

I therefore endeavored to improve the technique of bromoil in this respect and to work out a grain method which could be depended upon with certainty in every case. The basic thought was that the fundamental basis for making a coarse grain print should be a part of the film itself, and I endeavored to prepare the latter so that a grain structure could be produced which should equally underlie all parts of the image.

Such a grain structure can theoretically be obtained in the following way: if we allow a properly prepared uninked bromoil print, which has been brought to the proper degree of relief, to dry off a little and then spray it by means of an atomizer with extremely fine liquid drops, the film will again swell up under every drop, but only under these; and when we ink up, we obtain a definite grain effect which, however, only persists if the inking is completed before the sprayed-on water grain again dries out. Such a relief grain is not permanent, because the subsequently swollen portions of the film cannot retain the difference in swelling. This process, therefore, has only experimental interest and practically can be used but rarely.

To make the swelled grain useful, the secondarily swollen points of the film must permanently retain the difference in swelling which has been imparted to them.

To attain this end, I start from the fact that portions of the gelatine which are treated with alkaline solution will swell much more in a bath of warm water than spots which have not been thus handled. If, therefore, the desired grain can be applied to the film by means of an alkaline solution, all the elements of the grain will swell up more strongly in the water bath than their surroundings, and will therefore protrude above the rest of the film and thus attain and retain a better degree of swelling than the latent tanned image.

The next step was obviously a practical treatment of the film by spraying it as evenly as possible with extremely fine drops of an alkaline solution. It soon appeared that the greatest attention must be paid to the type of apparatus with which the spraying was to be done. Any atomizer whose spray combines fine and coarse drops is useless. Any atomizer which is worked by blowing with the mouth or by intermittent blasts of a pump is unsuitable, for at the instant when the stream of air is interrupted, a certain quantity of liquid remains in the mouthpiece and is thrown out by the next blast of air in the form of coarse drops. Therefore, only continuously functioning atomizers can be used, preferably those types which are actuated by double rubber bellows. Only with such atomizers is it possible to count with a fair degree of certainty on the production of a system of uniformly fine drops. Ammonia, which has previously been generally used in bromoil printing as a swelling agent, cannot be used to produce such a grain, because the ammonia gas volatilizes in great part in its passage through the air. A five per cent solution of potassium carbonate has been found to be most satisfactory.

The next question is at what stage of the process the swelled grain should be produced. Making it on the dry print is not permissible, because the droplets are taken up too greedily by the dry film and diffuse quickly and irregularly. The safest method of working is to place the bleached and dried print in cold water until it becomes limp, then blot it off until quite dry on the surface, and then treat it.

The practical method of producing the swelled grain is as follows: the print, which has been swelled in cold water and thoroughly dried off, is placed on a horizontal support and the atomizer set in action; as soon as it works with complete uniformity, it is passed back and forth across the print as evenly as possible under continuous observation, until the whole print is uniformly covered with a layer of extremely fine drops. The most important precaution is the continuous observation of the print while the spraying is being done, and this is best done by having the light fall on the print at as small an angle as possible. The practical way to do this is as follows: the print is laid on a table near the window. The operator sits in front of the window and gets both his eye and the atomizer very slightly above and in front of the print. Under these conditions there is a reflection of light in every single drop, which makes the observation of the distribution of the drops very easy. At the instant when the whole film seems to be uniformly covered with dew, the atomizer is quickly turned away from the print.

It is necessary to be thoroughly familiar with the action of the atomizer which is being used; with most atomizers the finest drops, on account of their lightness, fall downwards not very far from the mouthpiece, while others project their finest drops to a greater distance. The sprayed print, which naturally cannot be touched on the film side, must be left undisturbed for a certain period, which must be determined by experiment, for it depends, among other things, on the temperature of the room and the peculiarities of the paper which is used. An approximate idea may be had by considering these points: the longer the potassium carbonate solution lies on the print, the more the finest drops evaporate, while somewhat larger drops continue their action, so that the grain becomes coarser through longer action. A coarse grain can also be obtained by the use of coarse drops. If the drops are allowed to dry completely, the diffusion produced during this longer time results in an extra swelling of the whole film, without any grain effect.

After a sufficient time has elapsed, the potassium carbonate solution is removed from the film by rinsing or blotting off, and the print is swollen to the necessary degree. It is obvious that much lower temperatures must be used for this than if the print had not been treated with the graining solution, for the drops of the potassium carbonate solution cover a considerable fraction of the surface of the print. The fact that the greater portion of the surface of the print has been affected by the spray makes it apparent that the alkaline solution cannot be replaced by a tanning solution, for the greater portion of the film would become less capable of swelling if such a solution were used, and therefore the latent tanned image would be destroyed. When the print is blotted off after swelling, it should show a scarcely visible relief when looked at by light falling from the side. The actual effect of the grain cannot be perceived until after the inking has been done.

The prints obtained in this way have, if the treatment has been successful, a very beautiful grained structure which extends over the lights and shadows quite evenly. It is possible to work on such a print quite normally without having to harmonize the degree of relief and the consistency of the ink with great accuracy. Especially is it possible to work up any given part of the print as long as desired with the brush without endangering the structure; on the contrary, it is improved by this treatment. For bromoil transfer, there are the following special advantages: every new transfer has exactly the same coarseness of grain, if this is imparted to the film once for all. In combination transfer, the grain persists in spite of the fact that several impressions are made on the same paper, because the swelled-grain elements are re-impressed in the same spots, if the registration is accurate.

Finally, it might be well to mention a few causes of failure which frequently occur in the first experiments. If the print appears to be covered with many small white spots at a certain distance apart but not in contact, the grain is too heavy and therefore does not take up enough ink. In this case, after rinsing, the print may be sprayed once more, carefully and not too heavily.

Larger white spots on the print show that when the grain was made large drops were produced by the atomizer. If such drops are noticed while spraying, the print should be immediately placed in water, dried off and sprayed again. If the print shows spots of rather large area which do not take ink and only show irregular ink spots here and there, it has been sprayed too long, that is, too much potash solution was applied, and the print is then useless as it cannot be corrected. In addition, such a print may be easily recognized after swelling, for a coarse grain pattern will be clearly visible on the film.

This swelled-grain process permits of very beautiful and characteristic results, yet, like all variations, it assumes a solid knowledge of the bromoil process, and must be practically used over and over again before it can be applied with certainty.

Mixing the Inks.—As has already been mentioned, we have at our command for bromoil not only black and brown, but any other color of ink in various shades.

As a rule, however, colored inks are somewhat too bright to be used pure; moreover, as a rule they can only be had commercially in a fairly soft consistency. This is actually no disadvantage, as one is often forced by the consistency of the ink to do what is counselled by good taste, that is to tone down the colored ink with hard black ink. It is not practicable to make a mixture of hard black ink with the colored with the knife on the palette, because it is difficult to hit the exact shade with certainty in this way. It is better when using green, blue or any other colored ink to mix the inks with the brush on the bromoil print itself. First one should go over the whole print very delicately with hard black ink and almost complete the drawing by hopping. Then the work should be continued as would be done if we were mixing hard and soft ink, merely replacing the soft black ink by the colored one. Then the work should be continued with the mixed ink; if the exact shade has not been hit, more or less of one or the other color is taken up by the brush until the desired color effect is obtained.

It is immaterial that those parts of the print on which one has tested the mixture show a little too bright or too dark a tone. By going over these again with the final correct color these places, though perhaps only after resoaking, will reach the proper tone, as the ink in the brush and that already on the print quickly mix to a uniform value.

If, in the course of the work, it appears that the mixture of this and the colored ink, the color tone adhere properly, it is not advisable to attempt further softening by the addition of soft black ink. By the mixture of this and the colored ink, the color tone already decided on will be altered. In such a case varnish or linseed oil must be used to soften the mixed ink.

Polychrome Bromoils.—Prints of two or more colors have previously been made, aside from the three-color process printed from three-color separation negatives, chiefly by the gum-bichromate process, by coating the print successively in different colors. After each coating the negative was printed, usually with masks, and the unnecessary parts of each colored coating were washed away during development. The preparation of a polychrome gum print is extremely tedious and uncertain. Not the least of the difficulties is the fact that in consequence of the addition of the chromate the color effect cannot be determined with accuracy until the print is finished and the chromium salts are removed. Moreover, as a rule the color layers are perfectly distinct and the color mixtures formed by their juxtaposition must be accepted as they happen to come. A correction of the colors during the work is not easily effected.

The bromoil process, on the other hand, is in its very essence preëminently suitable for work in several colors, and offers all the possibilities which have previously been lacking. Without any special preliminary preparation the worker can apply any number of different colors to one and the same print at one sitting; he can harmonize them to each other during the progress of the work, combine neighboring colors by working them into each other on the print and easily correct any error that may occur.

It is true that the execution of a bromoil print in polychrome requires complete mastery of the process; an indispensable condition is a perfect command of the handling of brush and ink. Therefore, experiments in polychrome bromoil printing can only be recommended to those who have the monochrome process absolutely at their fingers’ tips.

If a negative is to be printed in several colors, the worker must first be absolutely clear as to his artistic scheme and know exactly in what color each individual part of the print must be executed; he must further be sure that the chosen colors harmonize with each other. He will not always be satisfied with the colors to be found in commerce, but must prepare the necessary inks for himself.

At first pictures should be chosen which contain large areas of uniform coloration, and as few colors as possible should be used. If you are not perfectly familiar with the print, it is necessary to have a proof as a guide, so as not to overstep the outlines of the different parts of the image which are to be individually colored.

The best way of setting to work is as follows: first select the color necessary for one or more of the larger areas of the picture, for instance green for the foliage, and work up these areas completely, until they have acquired the requisite vigor and detail. Such parts of the outlines as are adjacent to lighter, and hence more strongly swollen parts of the print, need be given no special attention, for color that does not belong on them may easily be removed again with the damp cloth, as previously mentioned. On the other hand it is well to work carefully with every outline which lies next to a darker part of the picture which is finally to be of another color. Here it is best not to apply the ink right up to the boundary, but to complete the inking with a small brush only after the adjacent parts are coated with their own color. If, however, such outlines are overstepped and the adjacent parts are colored with an ink that should not be applied to them, this should be removed with a very wet cloth, twisted to a fine point, by gentle rubbing. During this the print should remain on the pad. If the incorrectly inked portions are small in area the ink may be removed with art-gum.

When the first large areas are finished, the print should be again soaked in water, as it will probably have dried somewhat, then dried off, and another part of the picture dealt with, with a fresh color. If the adjacent colors are properly chosen, the result, with objects which have no sharp outlines but merge into one another, will be that the adjacent parts will spontaneously blend into a harmonious transition of color. Parts of the picture which have the same basic color must not be done throughout in one and the same shade; thus large stretches of vegetation, which extend into the distance, should be executed in front in a yellowish green, and should be shaded back into a bluish green and insensibly into blue in the distance; such transitions can be effected without difficulty. If in the shadows there are small parts which require another color, they should be inked with a very bright color, which is then reduced by going over the whole surface at one time.

If it is found that a mistake has been made in any color, that part of the print may be cleared of ink as described on page 72, and the work repeated. If it should finally appear that individual colors are too glaring or that the whole color scheme is too harsh, it is possible to go over individual parts or the whole print with some suitable color, so that the colors already applied are improved by a slight admixture of this covering color.

Such a procedure shows most emphatically what advantages there are in the possibility of mixing and toning down the colors on the print itself. As a rule, to tone down too bright colors, these portions or even the whole print are gone over with black ink, but if necessary other colors may be used for the same purpose.

Thus, for instance, a picture in which there are brown roofs, yellowish-green foliage, a sky of a pronounced blue shade and water of another blue, can be made harmonious by going over the whole print very lightly with the blue of the sky. Thus the vegetation will lose some of its yellowish tone, and all other colors, without losing their own characteristics, will acquire a certain unity. If the sky parts of a picture are swollen too much, their uniform inking is not easy. Then it is advisable to ink up the sky only on the dry print, as is suggested on page 112.

Because the tonality of any color, which has already been applied, can be altered with the brush, polychrome bromoil printing affords very great possibilities. Obviously good taste and a sound color sense are indispensable requisites, for without them there is danger of producing the undesirable effects characteristic of certain colored postcards. It may also be remarked that the colors, after defatting, have a somewhat less pronounced brilliancy, as they lose their gloss.

In polychrome bromoil printing, the choice of too small sizes is not to be recommended. The larger the picture is, the larger also are the areas which may be uniformly treated and, therefore, the easier it is to keep within the outlines.

Within the limits of this chapter, it is not possible to teach polychrome bromoil printing, only to outline its fundamentals. The unlimited freedom which it offers will certainly in the course of time produce many excesses in color. For this, however, we should condemn, not the process itself, but those who have abused it. In general it will be as well not to approach too closely the actual colors of the objects represented, but to work for the attainment of artistic effects. We must, however, in any case avoid even the most remote imitation of the painter; we cannot arrive at the solution of the problem of natural colors on paper by the polychrome bromoil process.