Digital BW, The Print

>... with watercolors ... you can look at the pigments 
> floating around in suspension right there on the paper 
> itself ... fairly coarse clumping of pigments ...

Those are probably mostly agglomerations of many particles.  I have in fact
printed with Daniel Smith "Extra fine" watercolors using an inkjet printer.

(Don't try this without knowing what you're doing.)

The main difference in grind may be that the watercolor pigments are not
processed to have as uniform particle size.  Also, of course, the
dispersant/base is very different.  

With filtering, a good high shear mixer, and other processing that only
companies in the business should try, I think we may have a broader palette
available to us than most think.  Further exploration of this is on my "to
do" list, in fact.  I'm working with an excellent watercolor painter
(Guggenheim Fellow, in fact) on a project in this general direction.  If we
succeed, watercolor painting and inkjet printing may have an interesting
overlap and fusion.  

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com 






 is actually the substance and beauty of
the medium. Hardly the kind of grinding that one would need to pass
through an Epson micro piezzo head for photogaphic smooth value
purposes. That is apples and oranges compared there.

What started this line of the thread was me saying that carbon pigment
in conjunction with micro grinding AND all the other components of an
inkjet formulation is a different animal than carbon pigment in a
natural form, pure carbon. 

If this were not true there would be no need to fade test these
monochrome inkjet prints at all to determine whether they were >200,
>300, etc. They would last into the thousands of years, or at least
until the paper fell apart. 

john