More tintypes, new tintypes.

 

"Tracks in white snow

Trees high and low

I want to say "Hello"

To whoever made these pawprints that show"

Here are a few more tintypes that I made this week.  These images were taken over my winter break, back in New York.  I really love living in California but there are time when I miss the changing of the seasons, especially snow during the winter time.  In New York, my family's house sits on a rural plot of land with a small wooded area behind.  You'd never know that small critters and deer come in and out of the yard all the time until the snow falls and you can see the tracks.  

I love to follow them and see where they lead, occasionally stumbling on a rabbit hole or den.  Sometimes the tracks lead nowhere, as if the animal changes its mind and returns back the other way.  Mostly, it's like observing miniscule traffic patterns, with one critter going left and another going right, intersecting at some point or another. 

In other news, I have sent my re-worked midpoint tintypes to various exhibitions.  One got back to me last night and I was accepted into the Alternative Process Exhibition for the Florence Quarter Gallery at Southeast University of Visual Art in Tuscon, AZ.  The exhibit goes up from March to April and I am pretty thrilled to be one of ten artists showing alternative work.

Making the tintypes has been a great experience and I managed to finish the last four this week as well.  I'm satisfied with these new four prints and I might go back to redo a few others.  It really depends on how much tintype developer I can stand smelling before fainting.  Man oh man! Is that stuff potent!  (Think of the smelling the most extreme and condensed version of ammonia.)  I'm seriously thinking of buying a vent. mask...

Anyway, I digress...

Now that most of the images, if not all, are done, I am now thinking about tintype presentation.  It's really difficult to try and find any source material on contemporary methods of displaying tintypes, especially if it's more than just one tintype to display.  Sure, I've seen a lot of antique tintype frames and CDV album pages but they aren't exactly what I'm going for in terms of presentation.  The problem with these types of housing is the image display space.  Especially with CDV album pages, the image space is really small.  6cmx9cm is the typical size that I see and my tintypes really utilize the 4"x5" space.  I'd hate to crop out the awesome melting details.  I do however, really like the embossed paper frames that tintypes used to be housed in during Victorian times.  I've been thinking of trying that and embossing thick card stock myself and then cutting a mat within the embossed edge.  We'll see...keep you posted I guess.  ;-)