Invisible Threat

The Paper Panic

I’ve been in and out of the studio for the last two weeks, still struggling with the issues I’ve been having with my Doll Head series. If you read ‘a serious departure’ you can see the change in the prints over time. The water color simply won’t come off the darn plates anymore. Anyway, I was slowing closing the edition of my 'Forgotten Aunt' print, the largest I’ve done in a while and I had to order a 100 pack of Rives BFK straight from the US distributor. The paper was dumped unceremoniously by the FedEx Ground jerk that delivered it and rescued from sticky fingers by Greg. Luckily, the paper was so thoroughly packaged that nothing was damaged and I began tearing sheets of it down to size.
I’d torn 6 sheets before a sudden panic struck me in the throat. This new paper seemed lighter and thinner than the stock pile of paper I’d been using since my senior year at Purchase. I pulled out the prints I had left on my drying rack and laid them out next to the new paper. Heart fluttering in panic and mind rampant with all of the consumer reports about corporations making they’re products smaller without changing the price, I flipped the paper about. I could feel a clear weight difference between them. The old stuff had to be nearly an ounce heavier than the new. Maybe I had gotten a bad batch, maybe I had ordered the wrong grade of paper? How could I edition a suite with varying paper weights? Panic. Panic. Panic. I’d already torn 6 pages I couldn’t demand a refund! Panic...
Then the light bulb went on.
The new paper was vacuum sealed and freshly opened. The old paper had been sitting out in the studio for months. The old paper was heavier, but not from manufacturing. It had absorbed all the water from humidity in the basement! How could I have missed this important element? It was a week later at the Blue Door Gallery Heritage opening that I realized in another light bulb moment that the same humidity that made my paper heavy was the only thing different in the studio. Therefore, it was the only logical reason for my Doll Heads not to be printing!
The moral of our story; never underestimate the power of environmental factors! Keep a barometric and temperature gauge in your studio space if you are a printer. And get a dehumidifier.