Digital BW, The Print

> And a few other no doubt expensive papers that look like they
> would be worth exploring. Has anyone come up with a home-brew
> coating for printing on art papers?

Don't laugh, these work pretty good -- pain in the rear to do though.

For pigment inks or dye inks that won't work with gelatin (see below) use
liquid egg whites (albumen).  Break the slight gloss with a few drops of
Maalox in the egg white solution.

For dye inks use Knox gelatin.  Soak the paper in the gelatin solution and
hang to dry or brush on multiple thin coatings.  Probably could use some
sort of roller as well but I always sort of liked the residual brush
strokes.  Note that not all dye based inks work with gelatin - Wide Spectrum
and Spectratones work fine with it.  Under some conditions you may have to
moisturize the paper before printing since a heavy gelatin coating tends to
get pretty hard.  Possibly the below recipe I found would be better and not
harden so much but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

From http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~mukluk/misc.html
Part of a Carbon Process printing recipe.

Mix together
110 parts gelatin
25 parts sugar
12 parts dry soap
350 parts water 


Finally - there is some sort of chemical that folks add to prevent mold
growth and insect problems.  Don't remember what it is though.  My
experiments didn't need preserving -- they were just experiments, better off
as roach food.

Dan Culbertson