windows - the kind made of glass and wood!

In addition to working on the cloth book and printing fine art photos to frame, I'm working on this huge project putting images on these four beautiful old windows someone threw out, At first i thought was going to do a transfer with Apollo Inkjet transparencies with Golden's soft gel to the window. but because of the scale i started having problems and because of trying to get it to stick to the glass i started mixing various Golden products. Eventually i made an emulsion by building up layers of gel mix on plain transparencies (it peels right off when you need it) and doing the transfer onto that. I then peeled off the emulsion and adhered it to the glass. but i was never happy with this. 1 i couldn't get a clean enough transfer for the look i wanted - always too much "distress." and 2 the colors were shifting because the transparency didn't react that well with the ink, unstable results again!

So then i came up with the idea of printing onto silk and adhering the silk to the window. I did many tests, worked hard at color correction and eventually settled on silk for Colortextiles. what follows is some of my notes on that process.

I use Photoshop CS to color correct. I have a curve just for Epson's "velvet fine art" paper profile for their R2400. I adjust for the apparent changes i can see on the screen from applying that paper profile. This curve is purely a tonal adjustment: a curve on an adjustment layer in the RGB that adjust midtone contrast and is set to "luminosity." I can transfer that adjustment layer to any image i'm going to print on that paper.

I found that the velvet fine art paper profile works best when i'm printing out using the matte black on a not so matte surface. with Colortextiles, once i apply the paper profile and add the midtone color contrast curve, it matches what's on the screen.

w/ the blumenthal, the paper profile adjustment didn't work. when i was testing it to use w/ the windows (i don't care for projects like the faces of the dolls), i had to apply an additional curve for the difference between what it looked like on the screen and how it printed on the silk. Actually i used selective color because when i used curves i could see the black and white and grays of my test strip were taking on color. when i used selective color, only the color i was adjusting changed.
But it was too much and there was banding -metamerism.

I made a decision about which images to use for the windows.

the original idea was that the images were all different stages of the cycle of earth: rock, sand, rotting plants and renewal in new plants. But when i worked with my old sand images i didn't think they were strong enough to interact with the leaves in the stream, (the rotting part where soil gets made). Also, although I have a ton of rock pictures, many of them are old scans that might not appreciate being blown up to 17 x 25!

Today i found that one of the recent beach pictures i took with the lens baby had a strong design element in the sea weed that interacted nicely with the leaves in the stream.

to that i added recent succulent plant image. now the cycle idea has loosened up a bit cuz of the sea weed in the sand picture. so it was suddenly OK to use a rock picture that's about 1/2 green plants (the rock is a strong orange from the carotene moss very strong colors support the idea of the strong rock) and that the moss showed an advanced stage of break down of the rock. so the concept is muddied. Still this one fit in a design way too.

all the curves and diagonals play off of each other. I put them in a low res photoshop file and messed with the opacity and created a drawing layer to get a real feel for how the shapes and colors interact. I also played with the blending modes, i'm not sure why! but anyway. i feel comfortable with the choice so i can begin the process of preparing the images to be printed on several sheets of silk ($$$$!!!!) after blowing them up and all. once i get the first one done i'll feel more comfortable ordering more silk. I wish i could afford those big rolls ... but it's ok. fitting together the 8.5 x 11 sheets gives me an opportunity to represent window panes on the windows.
(coming soon - why i changed my mind)