selective bleaching turns my print brown

[rjas]

I made a print today that I thought needed a bit of lightening in the eyes of the subject. I couldn't easily do it with dodging during exposure so I used some pott. ferra from the kodak sepia kit. Out of 3 tries using a 00 brush, it seems I got one good print. The first one was my first time selective bleaching so it was just a trainwreck, the second one was bleached a bit too long, and the third was the keeper. I fixed, then used washaid, then washed in water, then selenium toned. The selectively bleached portion in the print that I bleached too long turned a weird chocolate brown which looks very out of place in a selenium purple print. The keeper print's selectively bleached area turned much less warm (I assume due to the degree of bleaching), and it is one of my happy accidents. Although I like the effect in the keeper print as its not obvious, I'd like to know how to avoid this colour change if I need to in a future print. I did a search on the forum and it from what I can gather from the responses in the thread, another forum member "aggie" seems to discuss this exact occurance but I can't read any of her posts because they are all just dashes.

 

[rjas]

I checked around and it seems that some people that seem to know what they are doing say that bleaching before selenium toning won't make a colour change because the selenium has nothing to act on, (which seems untrue according to what just happened with the prints I talk about above), but then I was looking at Dave Miller's site and it seems that even he gets the same chocolate colour by bleaching first and then selenium toning vs the purple from just straight selenium. This is kind of a cool discovery because I've been looking for a warm chocolate coloured result.