Vandyke brown question

Ok, so I'm rounding up the materials. I'm sure I've got the chemicals I need in my online shopping cart ( Ferric ammonium citrate, tartaric acid, silver nitrate, sodium thiosulphate, and citric acid).

I think I'm going to go with Ilford FP4+ for my film because I liked it in 35mm and 120, unless anyone can offer up a reason to use something else. I'll be shooting 5x7, and I'm open to suggestions.

Since gold, platinum, and palladium toning are kinda pricy, I think I might hold of on toning until after I find out if this is a process I'd like to continue working with

You can probably skip the citric acid. A little lemon juice in your in initial wash/clear bath should be just fine. Just make sure that your wash water is chlorine free. I've had issues with prints clearing properly in chlorinated tap water.

Toning is not absolutely necessary, but a gold chloride based toner is helpful. It'll cool the images a bit, help with permanence, and reduce the bleaching action of the fixer.

Oh, and before I forget. Dry down is pretty heavy, be prepared to expose them lighter than you think you need. A little too dark in the fix will become a lot too dark when you dry the print.

Gadfly_71 said:

Toning is not absolutely necessary, but a gold chloride based toner is helpful. It'll cool the images a bit, help with permanence, and reduce the bleaching action of the fixer.

t.

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Just out of curiosity (and penny-pinching, too ), can VDB prints be sepia toned? I've got a bag of Legacy Pro sepia toner, and was wondering if that would suffice, or does toning have to be with a noble metal with VDB?

Yes, they can, but it's not worth it. You'll get an ugly, washed out, yellowish orange.
But if you want to keep the image brown, and not neutral like gold toners tend to make it, I can heartily recommend selenium toner. If used properly, it will turn the natural reddish brown of Vandykes into a dark chocolate brown which, in my opinion, looks really great.
When using any toner, keep in mind that colloidal silver is extremely responsive. Any effect a toner may have on a silver gelatin print will be exaggerated on a Vandyke. That's why toners must be much more diluted than usual. If you stick a Vandyke into a tray of normal strength selenium toner, it will turn orange in no time.
The same applies to gold toner, too. Gold toner may seem expensive, but if you consider that Vandykes use very high dilutions, and the concentrate keeps indefinitely, in the end it's not that bad.

As a rule ot thumb, any toner that works on gelatin silver prints will work on Vandykes, but much faster and more powerfully. So you'll need to use very high dilutions to control them, and even so you may not always be able to control some of them. For instance, the effect of sepia toners is strongly dependent not only on dilution, but also on the structure of the image itself, so you'll most probably never get a nice dark sepia on a Vandyke print.

Gold toner isn't expensive at all. With my local prices, USD 41 worth of Potassium Gold Chloride will make 2000ml toner. With the elaborate dilution + replenishment method I use, this is enough to tone about 80 8x10" prints *to completion*. In my case, the cost of gold is ~ USD 0.50 per print, about the same as the paper I'm printing on...

It is possible to get warm-toned prints with gold-thiourea toner, by further diluting the stock toner solution + lessening the toning time. In that case - perhaps? - the protection is diminished, but it's still strong enough to the point where prints processed in diluted toner don't bleach in the fixer.

Regards,
Loris.

Thanks guys. Everything I needed came in a couple of days ago. I held off getting any toner. I figured, perhaps erroneously, that I might be better off learning the process before throwing an extra step in there.

I have had a bot of trouble finding Arches platine paper in local art stores (I've never had to buy water color papers before, so the selection of pads and large sheets was kind of overwhelming. I did find one artist on Facebook that made VDB prints on Canson Montval paper, and I'm thinking I might give that a shot first since it's easy to find. Anyone had any luck with that?

VDB isn't very picky when it comes to paper. Canson montval is relatively cheap and very good paper for vandykes. You won't have paper problems with VDB, but naturally the prints would have different dmaxs and tones on different papers. For starters I would recommend selecting a paper that is friendly to your budget for learning the process, then select a different paper that suits your style and images.

Herzeleid said:

VDB isn't very picky when it comes to paper.

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I disagree. I've found Vandyke to pretty picky when it comes to papers. I get poor results from the new Stonehenge paper and Rives BFK doesn't work for me either. Canson Edition is a pretty good choice, as are Arches Platine, Arches Text Wove, and Revere Platinum. Platine is pricey and while it works well, I can't justify the cost. OTOH, Revere Platinum is the best I've found so far, and it works well for kallitypes (and platinotypes, I've heard). Arches Text Wove is very inexpensive, and I get great tonal range from it but it's pretty heavily textured (I like it, but some don't). Canson Edition has the benefit of low cost and it works well for a variety of processes (it's my preferred paper for cyanotype).

Like anything else around here though, YMMV. Test as many papers as you can 'til you find one that works for you.

Gadfly_71 said:

I disagree. I've found Vandyke to pretty picky when it comes to papers. I get poor results from the new Stonehenge paper and Rives BFK doesn't work for me either. Canson Edition is a pretty good choice, as are Arches Platine, Arches Text Wove, and Revere Platinum. Platine is pricey and while it works well, I can't justify the cost. OTOH, Revere Platinum is the best I've found so far, and it works well for kallitypes (and platinotypes, I've heard). Arches Text Wove is very inexpensive, and I get great tonal range from it but it's pretty heavily textured (I like it, but some don't). Canson Edition has the benefit of low cost and it works well for a variety of processes (it's my preferred paper for cyanotype).

Like anything else around here though, YMMV. Test as many papers as you can 'til you find one that works for you.

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Hopefully VDB printing wont be too fussy with the roll of Canson Motval I bought

I'm off tomorrow, so I'll probably shoot a few sheets, process them, and mix up the VBD chemicals so I can do a bit of printing later this week. I'll try to post scans of how bad I mess up my first VDB prints for everyone's amusement when I get around to it

Crane's kid finish ecru white paper was the only one that worked for me. I agree about the paper. I tried a lot of lesser-expensive papers (strathmore 400, watercolor blocks on sale).. only had problems.