In the case of night scenes, a cooler-toned print might be preferable. Retired from building full-size fishing boats, Beales resorted to building incredibly detailed scale models of his classic lobster boats, well into his late 80s. B&H stocks a wide selection of neutral, warm, and cool-toned cotton and fiber-based medium and double-weight papers in a variety of sheet and roll sizes.įinal hand-colored portrait of Alvin Beales in his workshop. Based on personal experience, I strongly recommend using a warm-toned, matte-surfaced print as a starting point, especially for portraiture and landscapes. Generally speaking, hand-colored photographs have muted color palettes, though bold coloration is doable. Since that time, hand-coloring has gone in and out of vogue on a regular basis in the fields of advertising, editorial assignments, album art, fine art applications, and for the longest time, portraiture. Coloring monochrome photographs remained in vogue until the arrival of the first Kodachrome color slide films, in 1935, which unlike the muted tones of tinted photographs, were bright, bold, and most importantly-accurate. The colors were chosen according to the colorist’s whim and personal aesthetics and reproduced as lithographic postcards and souvenir prints. What’s interesting is that the vast majority of these “cartes-de-visite,” as they were popularly known, were in fact black-and-white photographs that were colorized by lithographers who had never been to the places they were coloring. Hand-colored photographs © 2020 Allan Weitzīefore color photography became technically and commercially viable, black-and-white photographs were hand-colored and reproduced by lithographers in the form of postcards, magazine, and brochure illustrations. Toward the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of 20th Century, color lithographic postcards of popular tourist attractions and holiday destinations came into vogue, which opened up new avenues for working photographers. With the advent of paper print processes and tintypes, the use of transparent photo oils, dyes, and pencils became the media of choice for bringing color to black-and-white photographs.Ĭommercial applications of hand-coloring also found their way into use early on. In a bid to add life to the putty-like tonality of many of the earliest print technologies, photographers would very carefully brush thin layers of color pigments mixed with gum arabic (or quicker-drying mixtures containing alcohol) onto the cheeks, hair, and outerwear of portrait sitters. The practice of hand-coloring black-and-white photographs can be traced all the way back to the days of daguerreotypes, which predates Instagram creative filters by about 180-plus years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |