Sunday, May 09, 2010

Blog Notes: Platinum printing

Woodbury, Connecticut

Just thought it might be interesting to see what $375 worth of platinum salt looks like before you dissolve it in 50ml of distilled water. The crystals are a beautiful orange red color, and the mixed solution is sort of a pale ruby-red clear liquid a bit like some sort of fancy liqueur.

2 comments:

Scott Kirkpatrick said...

Elegant stuff. What color is the equivalent Pd salt? And how many prints will 50 ml of solution make? You said you are using about 20% Pt, 80% Pd (I think). Does that mean that you need 4x as much Pd salt as this little bag?

25 ml of olive oil will barely coat a good sized frying pan, so it sounds as if you'll need a lot of these fancy chemicals.

scott

Carl Weese said...

Scott, the Pd salt is a very dark dull brown. The particles are so fine there's no visual sense of crystal structure.

This is enough Pt for a lot of prints, at 10% of the mix. With this paper, more than 10% is a mistake, losing some smoothness of tone. The palladium and the ferric oxalate are the main components and I'll be mixing new 55ml batches of each every few days. Each 8x10 requires about 1.5ml each of ferric and metal solutions.