Handcolored negatives to debut at Celebrate the Arts

Varying degrees of success getting the saturation I want with neutral black and white surrounds. With the exception of the yellow rose...that was purely an exercise in color contrasts and pen point vs broad side coloring to build texture.  I think it all worked, 'cept the first.  Am slowly learning that it isn't exact opposites on the color wheel when scanning hand colored black and white negatives to make them into positives.

A bit on scanner settings. I do scan max DPI with the Epson Perfection V600.  I scan from the profession mode where I can get the best control of the final output.  The max DPI is 12800 which even from a small negative yields huge files...along the order of 50-70 megs depending on the detail in the image.  I chose the scan in 48 bit color to capture all the subtleties of the color I apply to the negatives.  I still use the Black and White film as type as opting for "color negative" gives it all a ghastly orange tint that simply can't be corrected out.

File resizing for image size and usable dpi for images is done with the help of Adobe CS5. While we are on the topic of CS5, have I mentioned recently how much I love the "spot healing brush tool"?  Its simply magic and is the most useful tool in working with scanned negatives and "spotting" out rough spots in the color or removing dust particles.  No matter how clean I keep things there still is dust that makes it into the scan...microscopic stuff that I can't really see until the scan is blown up, yet the tool removes it and blends in the scene perfectly.

These images will be appearing in the trusty satchel of images and possibly framed for the coming Monrovia Association of Fine Arts "Celebrate the Arts" to be held on October 8/9 in the heart of Old Town Monrovia in Library Park.  (Monrovia, California, not Libya).

keep it simple silly

Its so hard for me to stay in the lines let alone keep things simple. However subtlety is something I'm working on in my art. Not so much the slap your face with this is different, rather stops you for a second to go "huh!?" while you ponder what you are looking at trying to figure out what got your attention.

So...I took some Black and White negatives from a shoot the other day and hand colored them quite subtly. Well, kept it to simple elements rather than an entire frame. I think "LOS" was a bit more successful than the wild flowers.

Being subtle is hard for me

Those of you who know me, know too well that subtle is rarely something one thinks of when they think of me. I like bold and in your face stuff with my art. Though subtlety does have its moments for me.

Since I've reverted back to film I've been shooting each frame twice, once to be pristine for eternity, the other to be colored in with magic markers to change the look and feel of the image. I'm not bracketing, rather just shooting the same image twice. Maybe 3 times if I really want to be brave and work an image up to the max or save room for a flub.

Purple makes yellow in the negative world and that is all it took to had the splash of yellow to these two images. A few quick strokes of a purple pen (hmmm...Harold and the Purple Crayon?) and I now have a splash of color that changed up the original images. I like it. I may be doing more so with subtle than with bold in this series. Just maybe.

Talk about stepping outside the box

I got the wild idea while in college to color in black and white negatives with felt tip markers for printing on color paper. I used opposite colors, cyan for red, blue for yellow etc., on the emulsion side of the negative and would print on color paper. It was a total pain in the butt trying to get the grays to print neutral without the orange cast of a traditional color negative but I persevered and got them to work.

Flash forward more years than I care to admit and I discovered these negatives while I was digitizing and archiving some of the early work that was important enough to keep in this realm. Imagine my surprise and outright glee when I found them and remembered the process. Of course now with our new technology scanning them in "48 bit color" instead of trying to print on paper that needed the orange cast of a kodacolor negative its all done automatically. Love it.

I just may have to break out the darkroom equipment and start shooting in black and white again to continue this experiment. Of course I will be scanning the negatives, not printing them as I don't have a place to set up a darkroom.