Friday, June 16, 2017

Waiting . . .

Various printers, papers, techniques aren't coming together well right now regarding my handmade book.

My Epson Stylus Photo died. So I replaced it with a Canon Pro-100. The rice paper I want to use in it won't feed. I tried a variety of techniques and finally got it to work. Hooray.

But the Canon inks are different. They don't play well with the various techniques I was hoping to use to stain and blend into the papers I'm creating for the book. Very weird and ugly colors have been the result.

So I switched over to my HP LaserJet printer. Which prints black and white. No problem, since I'm going to be staining the pictures anyway. But the paper won't feed. The resulting paper jams caused the printer clutch to disengage and horrible grinding sounds ensued. Chris, being mechanically inclined (versus me, who can't even figure out how to use a can opener), fixed it.

So now what? I'm thinking that maybe the brand of rice paper I'm using could be the issue. So I've ordered a package of a brand I used a couple of years ago, and it arrives this weekend.

The result has been a lot of downtime, time away from creating this #$%@&* wonderful book. So I've been making and uploading more images to Fine Art America, playing around with my Lensbaby (version 2.0 -- quite old, but the new ones are quite expensive), and experimenting more with black and white photography.

These peonies were taken with the Lensbaby and then converted to black and white using Nik Silver Efex 2. No clue what I'm doing, but that's okay . . . I'm learning. If nothing else, I'm learning patience!

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.