Digital BW, The Print

Ho boy!  From a longevity point of view and from a "probable changes in aging" point of view this is very wrong.  

Hair sprays as a class are "throw away" designs made to achieve some set purpose (no pun intended) at the cheapest production cost.  Therefore they will have poor and unpredictable aging characteristics.  The one thing I can guarrantee is that the resulting film will not remain the same for very long perhaps a matter of weeks, but certainly only months depending upon the keeping or exhibiting environment.  Some decades ago, hairspray were experimented with to "fix" sensitive and friable surfaces such as some types of pastel artworks.  Physically a success but they soon aged badly and were ruined.

If you need a cheap test material to judge pre and post surface fixing along the way to developing a final workflow to save on the more expensive materials I see little wrong but not for good prints if you care about their longevity.

My two cents worth as an art conservator involved with digital media.

Mark MacKenzie
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: frankbickelmeyer 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 6:53 AM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Hairspray as Glossoptimizer


  Hi,
  when printing with the MIS Eboni-ink on Brilliant Museum Silver gloss 
  paper i used to get some broncing and gloss differences. I´ve tried a 
  simple hairspray to coat the paper and: bingo gloss difference is 
  nearly eliminated! Is it a good idea to practise it in this way or do 
  you you think it has some negative aspects a lessenening the longlivety?



   
  . 

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