Hi everyone! I’ve got 5 images uploaded here — the first one is the chemigram created in today’s demo. The 4 others are crops made from that image. I’ll talk about each one, though you’ll have to jump into the slideshow to see the full compositions of each (sorry!).  

Full Chemigram:

  1. So in the creation of this one, we had some success getting blue to show up. It was evident in the background at first, but then I got to talking while the developer was lingering on the surface, and it seems like this made the orange marks a little more powerful. You can still see some blue in the background, but I think if I had moved it along to the fixer sooner, there would have been less time with the developer, keeping the background lighter and allowing the blue to shine. However, that tiny bit of teal on the far right side is pretty rare, and I’m super excited about it. 
  2. Someone asked about trying to get some larger circles for the tree-ring effect, so my logic was to agitate the print more to remove more oil. That would have allowed for a larger area of the resist to go away, making some thicker lines in black and white as I would have kept alternating in developer and fixer. But it appears I got a bit too zealous agitating the print, which we saw when I reached the fix and realized there really wasn’t much oil left on the surface at all. So the tree rings that did happen remained very small and tight. 
  3. After we saw most of the oil was gone, we talked about trying to take those remaining covered areas and turn them orange. We didn’t get a great result with that, as it looks like I overfixed for getting color. We also have to remember that there is more fixer in the water tray to the right of the fixer now than when I started, and that could have assisted in the “over-fixing”.  All that being said, I do see some pinkish-orange marks in some of those areas now that the print is dry — when it was wet, everything looked lighter, so the dry-down made those tiny marks visible. 
  4. Lastly the composition — I’m not in love with it overall, as I feel like it’s a pretty large shape that is taking up about half of the paper, so it’s not a more pleasing Rule of Thirds situation to allow for more optical movement. Because that shape had so much visual weight, I felt the shape had to be at the bottom of the composition. And trying the landscape orientations felt to me too much like a lopsided left-right comparison situation. The lines being at the top and their orangey fire quality are giving me “asteroid that killed the dinosaurs” vibes. 

Version 1: This makes the foreground shape become more prevalent, and allows me to dig more into its textural details. I like having the high value bright area of the background next to the low area dark black, creating a focal point that isn’t dead-centered. I also felt the brightest area needed to be in the top half since lighter values have less visual weight. 

Version 2: This is doing a similar thing with the lightest areas being on top, but now I feel like the focal point becomes the blue/pink/purple area, since most of the composition is the warmer rusty oranges, yellows, and off-white. But that teal is still there in the upper right creating some optical movement with a line leading me off to the right. 

Version 3: The long and thin composition isn’t too traditional for Western art, but I really like the associations to both Japanese scroll paintings, and also the long, thin nod to photographic film. I feel like this one has a focal point of the darkest area next to the lightest area, then the optical movement leads me down to the pink/blue/purple as a unique color, then I have a long line of rusty orange to complete the movement off the paper. Those two lightest-value oval-ish shapes at the bottom also create a little bit of compositional tension, but as it can relate back to the same high value at the top, it doesn’t feel as awkward to me as it might if there weren’t a high value at the top. 

Version 4: This one I thought I would play with a more formal type of balance, where the composition is split almost equally along a diagonal. I still felt the orientation had to be one of the two where to highest values go to the top. I also thought the purple/pink/blue area felt more grounded at the bottom, and then the faint line of blue appears through the lighter background to provide a little optical movement though that space. 

You may be asking, is it really practical to make such small physical crops to an already-small piece of paper? Personally I think the answer could be yes or no. Some people make small art, and it creates a really intimate experience for the viewer who gets to see it in person. But a chemigram can also be a starting point for a different type of final artwork, as I showed you in the last chemigram in my powerpoint (that I mounted to a panel). You might want to make a crop to improve composition, print it larger on an inkjet printer… or create digital art from it… or use it as the starting point of a mixed media piece. Chemigrams have no limits 🙂