What is pigment stain?
Pigment stain is what I call it when pigment lodges where it doesn’t belong. Pigment stain consists of pigment only, (distinguishing it from fog, which is made of hardened gum containing pigment) and can take a number of different forms. One common form is a permanent indelible stain in paper, where the pigment sinks into the paper and stains the fibers irrevocably. This occurs more often on unsized papers, but can occur on sized papers as well, when pigment is used in excess. The print above, for example, was printed on sized paper; I used so much red pigment that it permeated the sized paper, leaving a red cast in the image that turned the grass orange instead of yellow-green and the sky purple instead of blue. (The photograph was taken in the middle of a summer afternoon, not at sunset). But some pigment stain on well-sized paper can be wiped off, as can pigment stain on glass, which is why I have expanded my definition of pigment stain from the traditional definition of an indelibl
