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Rock & Mineral Types *** ALL *** Agate Amethyst Ammolite Bloodstone Calcite Chalcedony Charoite Chinese Picture Stone Chrysocolla Copper ore Fluorite Hypersthene Indian Paint Stone Jasper Labradorite Lapis Lazuli Larimar Malachite Meteorite Mica Nephrite Obsidian Ocean Jasper Olivine Opal Paesina Stone Picasso Stone Quartz Rhodochrosite Sandstone Serpentinite Stichtite Thunder Egg Tiger's Eye Tourmaline Turquoise

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About Our Prints

• How The Minerals Are Formed
• How The Images Are Produced
• How The Images Are Printed
• Formations: The Book About Images From Rocks
• The Geology Of Minerals

How The Minerals Are Formed

Minerals are naturally occurring materials, formed through geological processes, and each has a specific chemical composition with atoms arrayed in an orderly crystal structure.

Thanks to the varying conditions of their formation and geological history, minerals occur in an endless variety of forms - and minute traces of other elements can completely change their colours.

Silica is the key constituent of the majority of the minerals presented here: if carbon can be regarded as ‘the element of life’, then silica deserves recognition as ‘the element of beauty’.

Many minerals I use are either found as the by-product of mining or other operations such as road construction - or are extracted for collectors or for making jewellery.

Many specimens are polished before scanning to bring out the full richness of detail and colour, but, as this is a relatively expensive process, a similar, if temporary, result can be obtained by coating ‘rough’ material with Johnson’s baby oil!

I also work with decorative stones, which are aggregates of minerals and/or organic materials (Italian Paesina Stone, Indian Picture Stone from the USA, and Chinese Picture Stone for example), and some materials that are generally known by ‘mineral’ names, such as jasper, which have been shown by detailed analysis to actually be stones.

Minerals vary hugely in price according to quality, rarity and size, and, like all collecting, can become addictive! I seek them out in every city I visit, but good shops are few and far between - and I increasingly use the internet to buy material.

My ‘mineral habit’ has so far cost over £50,000, and I can’t see an end in sight, but I very much hope that you will share my enjoyment of the results.

How The Images Are Produced

Although these images are ‘drawn by light’, and so may properly be called ‘photographs’, they are actually produced using digital scanners, not cameras.

This has several advantages: directness; no complications with lighting; and the large file sizes (up to 3GB for each image) that can be immediately created.

To reveal the full beauty of the minerals, the images are ‘cleaned’ of traces of polishing powder, dust and other impurities: this mind-numbing process can take many hours, and is generally undertaken to the background of Radio 4.

Most images are produced with an A4 photo-scanner using either reflected or transmitted light. The same specimen may present completely different colours according to the way it has been scanned (see, for example, AG-169 and AG-171, which are made from the same agate), and even after several years of getting to know minerals, frustratingly few yield anything worthwhile.

I also use an A3 scanner that has an adjustable focal plane, which gives a sharper image from irregular rather than flat mineral specimens.

The scanner reveals remarkable detail and subtlety of colour not apparent to the naked eye (click on the adjacent images to see the indicated areas in detail), and with some minerals the results are wholly unexpected. Tourmaline, for example, superficially resembles a piece of coal, yet - after trying many ‘angles of attack’ - the first piece I scanned yielded two fascinating images (TM-101, TM-102) that I have been unable to equal since.

Of all the minerals I have explored, quartz is amongst the most expensive and - from an image-making point of view - elusive. It is impossible to predict how the scanner will ‘see’ the evanescent inclusions of gases and minerals, fracture planes and other features that render quartz crystals endlessly fascinating. When they ‘work’, however, the results are a pure delight.

How The Images Are Printed

Our prints are produced on the highest quality art paper, printed by Fine Art printers, canvases hand varnished, and all frames hand painted at our printers - so you will be most pleasantly surprised by our prices!

Paper: we decided that the images needed to be printed on the finest quality paper and canvas by world class Fine Art printers, who only specialise in Fine Art printing and nothing else.

After a great deal of research and test printing, and in consultation with our printers, we have decided to use Hahnemuhle FineArt - the “gold standard” for archival quality artists prints since 1584, made using spring water and the highest quality pulps. The specific paper we use is Hahnemuhle German Etching 310 gsm mould-made, acid free etching paper with a velvety smooth surface making it ideal for our highly detailed, photographic images, particularly as this paper has been specially coated for excellent image sharpness and optimum colour graduation. It is produced using state-of-the-science environmentally friendly methods with as much recycling as possible, then tested by ten factors including ink, water and air permeability.

The canvas we use is the quality equivalent to the Hahnemuhle paper: Fredrix Archival Canvas semi-matt.

Mounting: a range of mounts have been tested, and we have decided on a slightly off-white (not “bright white” despite its name - “Snow White”) with a double thickness, which is angle cut to the print surface giving a very high quality, but “unfussy” finish.

Framing: even more testing has resulted in the decision to use a hand painted (at our printers) black wood frame in a contemporary style. We think it perfectly complements our images - without competing with them. It is made from an African tree, Obeche (Triplochiton Scleroxylon), which is a timber in plentiful supply and from managed forests. Obeche wood is, in fact, the best quality, and used mainly for bare wood profiles like ours, although we have it hand painted at our printers.

Canvas Finishing: all our canvas prints are hand finished with specially formulated “satin gloss” varnish - literally, the varnish is applied by brush, print by print. All our stretched canvases are made individually by hand, and have corner wedges (more taut canvas, longer lasting tension). They are made from the same Obeche wood as the frames (see Framing above). All images run round the sides, so that from the side or the front all you can see is image - and no white canvas.

Printing Options: we can discuss non-standard materials, sizes, creative treatments, mounting and framing, but, obviously, costs and timescales will rise, sometimes quite dramatically. Please use the Contact Us details to get our discussions started.

Click here to go to the Contact Us page.

Our printers: Fine Art Solutions. Visit them at: www.fineartsolutions.co.uk

Formations: The Book About Images From Rocks

Formations: Images From Rocks by Professor Richard Weston is a lavishly illustrated, beautiful 116 page book that tells you all about minerals and the processes of creating these images.

Formations is available at £15.00 (plus £3.00 P&P), or for £7.50 (plus £3.00 P&P) when you buy a print

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The Geology Of Minerals

The Rock Cycle

Earth is a dynamic planet in a state of constant change. Rocks and minerals are perpetually created, destroyed, transported and re-formed into new generations of rocks and minerals. Geologists use the expression ‘the rock cycle’ to encompass this grand, planetary-scale tour.

Earth itself has a simple basic structure: a solid nickel and iron inner-core; a molten outer-core comprising the same elements; a solid but pliable mantle rich in magnesium and silicon - and a relatively thin, but rigid crust with oceanic and continental components.

Earth’s crust can be divided into about a dozen major plates: the continental plates (like Africa, Europe, Australia and the Americas) are about 35km thick, and separated from one another by oceanic plates (like the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Antarctic) with a crust about 6km thick. In the process of plate tectonics, rafts of cool, rigid crust are driven in conveyor-belt fashion across the globe.

Energy as heat from the core and mantle is convected to Earth’s surface, creating bodies of molten rock (magma). Because it is hot and buoyant, this rises to the surface creating linear chains of volcanic activity that traverse the major oceans. At these oceanic-ridges, magma erupts into the crust, then cools to form solid rock. Slowly, over millions of years, the process known as subduction can then causes entire oceanic plates to be dragged back down into the earth, leading to the collision of continental plates - and the massive pressures exerted forcing up mountain ranges, like the Himalaya.

The Impact Of The Earth’s Surface

The rock cycle creates the three types of rock - igneous (formed of fire), sedimentary (settled down) and metamorphic (from the Greek “to change form”) - but then the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere act to destroy rocks.

Igneous rocks and minerals, for example, are created at high temperatures and high pressures deep in the crust, so are often inherently unstable in the cold, wet conditions of Earth’s surface. They weather chemically, breaking down to their constituent minerals, or are altered to more stable minerals such as clays.

Physical processes are also at work. Ocean waves pound coastal cliffs, glaciers reduce granites to rock “flour”, and rivers carve vast canyons. Glacial debris from the Himalaya is transported by vast river systems and is eventually deposited in deltas and in ocean basins. Particles of sand are driven thousands of miles across deserts by the wind.

As the energy available for transport wanes, particles are deposited forming unconsolidated sand, mud and clay sediments. Over time, these build up, layer by layer, bed by bed, to form thick sediment sequences. The sediments become progressively buried and transformed by cementation and compaction into solid sedimentary rocks like sandstones and mudstones.

Sedimentary rocks themselves can be eroded time after time, forming and reforming sediments and sedimentary strata. Volcanism, metamorphism and deep burial in the crust create hot fluids which can dissolve rocks and minerals, and which can also create mineral veins and pods within older rocks. Where precipitation occurs within open fractures, large, perfectly-formed crystals develop into minerals such as quartz.

Each image in this book is a graphical representation of a point within this grand planetary scale cycle frozen in time. Each contains glimpses of this story played out at the scale of molecules. Some, such as the Paesina Stones, look uncannily like ‘real’ landscapes, and in part this is because of a genuine correspondence between small- and large-scale processes. With many others, such similarities of appearance are deceptive. Horizontally-banded agates, for example, might appear to be the product of a simple process of sedimentation, whereas in fact the process is more complex - and far from fully understood.

Agates are formed of chalcedony, a microcrystalline form of quartz, and the most spectacular examples come from open pockets, created by trapped gas bubbles in basalt lavas into which ground water percolates. The structure of agate is comprised of concentric shells, differentiated by colour, which are derived from differences in the orientation of the microscopic fibrous crystals that make up the rock, plus variations in trace elements within the crystals.

Crystal structure and mineral habits

We are all familiar with the six-sided quartz crystal with a pyramid-like point or metallic cubes of pyrite - so-called ‘Fool’s Gold’. Crystals conform to a limited number of crystal systems: cubes, hexagons and sheets, for example, because their constituent elements, oxygen and silica in quartz, or copper and carbonate in malachite, can only bond in a few predefined geometric configurations.

Other minerals have extremely homogeneous structures, such as agates, which are structurally identical in all directions, while Mica forms tabular, plate-like sheets.

Branching patterns are among the most familiar in nature - from plants to river-deltas. Known generically as dendrites (from the Greek word dendros, meaning leaf), the classic embodiment of dendritic mineral formation occurs where manganese in solution diffuses into a crack within a rock, and reacts with oxygen to create manganese oxide.

Colours

A multitude of phenomena produce colours in minerals, the most common source being small amounts of metallic elements, such as iron, manganese and copper distributed in the crystal lattice.

These absorb certain wavelengths of light: iron and manganese in quartz produce the purple of amethyst, and copper in malachite gives green. Microscopic structural features of crystals also provide colour, as light is scattered or bent through them. Tiny fibrous crystals within chalcedony - the microcrystalline form of quartz found in agates and jasper - give a milky blue colouration as light breaks into rays, the red component is generally absorbed and the blue reflected.

Tiny finely distributed pockets of gas, liquid or solid can scatter light, and cleavage, the regular arrangement of planes of weakness in a crystal structure, gives colour in moonstone and labradorite.

In opal, the mineral structure is created by microscopic silica spheres packed in a regular arrangement, which produce a brilliant play of colour as light is reflected and diffracted by the silica particles.

Rock degradation and weathering also provide intricate and subtle colour variation, for example iron minerals weather to give reds, and in Indian Paint Stone cracks within the rock have concentrated the flow of water and this has created the sites of oxidation.

For a more comprehensive explanation of how the minerals have been formed, see Formations, Images From Rocks, Richard Weston’s book about our earth images. You can buy a copy here at a discounted price.

Click here to find more about the Formations book.