I’ve been playing around with a variety of printing papers lately, trying to find a reasonable substitute for the late, lamented Luminos Charcoal (aka Kentmere Fine Art Classic).

I’m afraid there may not be one.

The closest I have found was from Bergger, but the quality of two separate orders was so bad — pieces of emulsion were flaking off when I first pulled the paper from the box — that I haven’t tried them again. To their credit, the company refunded my money but seemed indifferent to the fact that the paper was a complete mess.

More recently I’ve been playing with some of the Eastern Bloc stuff. Foma, so far, is my favorite; they make a Foma Fomatone Classic VC FB that has a nice olive cast to the image and a pleasant creamy base. It’s fairly expensive — about $1.06 a sheet for 8×10 — but nice to work with, as in the image above, which I printed Sunday and colored this afternoon.

photo: Ferns, 2010, 5×7 hand colored photo