Two New Gum Prints

The past couple of weeks have been kind of crazy, so I don’t have much to report. As I mentioned in my last post, I was sick for a week and a half, and as a result didn’t get much work done during that time. I feel better now, but I was sick right up until this past Monday, when I returned to teaching for the first time since last May. The first week of school is always exhausting-there’s a million little things that need to be done RIGHT NOW, and getting back into the routine of teaching is tiring. I was expecting it to be worse after having been away for so long, but it really wasn’t. I’m about as tired as I would be after any first week in a semester. In other words, exhausted, but I’ll survive.

In between teaching, trying to sleep, and being sick, I did manage to finish a couple of gum bichromate prints that I started a couple of weeks ago.


This one, like several pieces I’ve posted here, was shot at the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco last October. It’s looking into one of the antique arcade games they have there.


This one was shot after Thanksgiving at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago. There’s a display of three dated looking anatomical models tucked into a stairway. This is one of them. I shot several closeup photos and made a mosaic in Photoshop to print from.

Both of these pieces were printed five times. I printed yellow first, followed by magenta, cyan, and black in that order. After the black layer was printed, I thought that something was lacking in both of these prints. Deciding that they needed more yellow, I added a second yellow layer, which proved to be way too strong. I ended up removing most of the second yellow coating from both prints, but the little that I left on really improved the prints a great deal.

I’ve got five more gum prints in progress as I write this, including a couple that I’m experimenting with. I’ll explain in detail when they are finished and I post them here.