Fine art Medias are going to be made with 100% cotton, manufacture in one or two ways. A hot press or mould made and means that they actually make the 100% cotton pulp and it’s a liquid in a batch and they pour into a mould and then they hot press it between two smooth metal plates.
The hot press mould made is going to be your smoothest like an ultra smooth paper or really smooth product that’s going to give you the smoothest looking product available with 100% cotton fine art medium. The cold press, the cold press is a more like in extrusion process where they’re taking or squeeze in the water out of the pulp and then they’re just with cold metal plates. And most of the times those metals plates have texture on them; they’re squeezing out, squeezing that material down to the required thickness.
So cold press would be a media that it’s going to have texture to it, a hot press is going to be one that’s going to be really smooth. ]
Now buffering is something that library of congress specifies for archival papers, because for longevity of your prints ink is not an issue anymore. Ink they have so stable, the pigment of ink are so stable, they’re virtually unaffected by UV light. The weakest link in all the inks in almost all of the major manufactures ink sets is the yellow and the yellow has even a radiant of over 120 years, 150 years. Where as you get into the black the carbon fiber made for the blockings, those have a rating of over 800 years. So the ink isn’t the weak part of the link in making fine art prints and have a longevity, it’s your media and the media most of the time isn’t totally affected by UV as much as it is by environmental contaminants.
So the library of congress is giving specifications for archival papers where they buffer at 2% calcium carbonate and what does, is that in environmental contaminants are absorbed by the calcium carbonate before they take the media so all the really good high-end fine art papers are going to be buffered with two percent calcium carbonate. Some of the companies that I found that have some really high end products would be premier art, whose offered this engineered solution we’ll talk about shortly. Epson, they always do some premium products. HP has some really nice products; Hahnemuhle has some really nice products in the fine art papers. So look for those requirements.
In fine art Medias, another new technology, another new product that they’ve made is where they take in a hot press mold made really smooth media would be the 100% cotton media. That’s the fine art media and what they do is they put a luster coating on that product and it looks like the traditional silver highlight fiber based black and white prints. The product has a great feel to it. It’s a luster coating on it so it feels like an old time black and white prints and the awesome thing about this media. It’s one of the only lusters that will work with both total black and matte black. That’s one of the new products that has been made by almost all the major manufacturers and it’s a luster coating on top of the fine art media, really cool stuff check it out.
Our next category of media is the art media or commonly known as a water colored papers. The difference between art Medias and fine art Medias is fine art Medias are 100% cotton. It’s only thing that’s acceptable for Museum quality. But the art Medias, which is our water, color papers, those are made with wood fiber and they’re actually called the Alpha cellulose paper. What they do is they take your wood pulps and they remove the lignin out of those Medias and they end up with the products that’s really nice product called alpha cellulose. Lignin is a natural occurring substance in wood and it’s cotton that’s why cotton is lignin free, because it doesn’t come from wood. And the wood is processed to varying degrees to remove the lignin. Newsprint is a good example of lignin, it has no reason to take it out, that’s why it has a yellowish color, and also the lignin is very unstable. That’s why when a newspaper is left out in the sand for few hours, it turns yellow. The lignins are reacting to the sun. Obviously that’s not a good thing for any paper that we have any expectations of your image permanents.
So if a paper now removes all the lignin only the raw cellulose is left. This term is called alpha cellulose and an alpha cellulose paper is very stable, it’s not as good as cotton but it’s still really good. So this alpha cellulose papers are lignin free. They’re acid free, almost all of those art Medias that are watercolor have a texture to them so almost all of them are made with cold press that means that the pulp is extruded out of a machine with cold plates that usually have a texture to them and the good manufacturers are buffering this media. So that’s a good thing to check. When you’re looking at watercolor papers, which usually are anywhere, from a half to a third the cost of the fine art Medias and make sure that they are buffered. And its good call a reliable manufacture of this media to guarantee that you’re going to have a really good product that where there’s not partial lignin till left in it.
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