A few months ago I was contacted, through this Blog, by a student I was at art school with. We are talking 40+ years ago, so it was a big surprise to catch up and hear what he, and others in the same year, had been up to over that time.
As a result of that initial email contact, I thought I'd shuffle through through my old papers and prints looking for student work from that time to share online.
Amazingly I found quite a few examples, including some of my old portfolio work from the late 70s. While some of the material I discovered was definitely looking very dated, it gave me the idea of collecting everything I could find from that period and putting it into a digital photo book - because it seemed like a good project for a wet afternoon, but also because, as I discovered in my initial search, some of the prints had already faded - possibly because I hadn't washed my black-and-white prints sufficiently back in the day - so scanning and editing them into a commercially printed photo book would prevent work from fading further - and from being lost or damaged in the future.
My rummaging produced several hand-coloured images that I had made back in 1979 for my graduation show. Hindsight is one thing but I have to say that looking at some of these old attempts to create hand-coloured art were pretty crude. Still, I guess, 'you gotta start somewhere...'.
I found it fun to scan the originals and retouch the digital files using Photoshop Elements, something that certainly wasn't available 45 years ago. In some examples I modified and edited the colour, the paint strokes and even the composition. I wish I'd had such editing power back in the 70s.
After I'd lived in Sydney for a few years I began producing hand-coloured images of city landmarks to sell on commission around town, as well at several weekend markets. I had years of getting up at 5:30 to get to Balmain markets early on a Saturday morning to set up a tiny stall and try to sell my work to passing locals and tourists alike. It was fun to do and a good exercise in fine tuning a technique I'd originally blundered into back in the UK in the late 70s.
This gave birth to the Hand Colouring (and other alternative photo processes) book you see above. To see what's in it click the image to go to the Blurb web page.
But, once I'd filled that book with some of the better looking results, along with records of my work that was published in the local photo magazines, plus a bunch of images created using some of the old fashioned alternative processes like cyanotypes and Polaroid Transfers, I turned my interest to what I have done with photography since digital photography became readily accessible to the general public.
Naturally Digital Picture FX became my next book project, assembling some of my favourite photos along with work I've used over the years in my publishing career - in a stream of local and overseas magazines, and more recently, as illustrations in software books such has Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2024, published on Amazon just last month.
One of my favourite hobbies, started during COVID, is painting with watercolous. I love the process but not necessarily the end product! For many years I have tried to re-present photographs in a format that look closer to hand made art rather than a commercially-produced, industrially-accurate and often predictable photographic print. Photoshop and most other photo editing applications are really poor at converting a regular-looking photo into something that looks hand drawn or painted. Believe me, I have tried and it never produces a credible result. Once Apps began to populate the internet there were several great products available that produced some good 'painted' results but sadly most of these have been replaced with something that's not as good. Then I discovered Dynamic Auto Painter, a Canadian software application that produces impressive and quite authentic 'paint' results from digital files. So I decided a book on Digital Painted FX should be the next project.
On this book's cover is one of my favourite shots of autumn in Japan given the DAP (I used version 7) effect. Dynamic Auto Painter is packed with presets - you choose a painting style - this particular preset was called 'Benson', named after the American painter Frank Benson (1862-1951).
It seems to work well on a wide range of subject matters. Add the effect and watch as DAP runs its magic on the pixels. You can leave it at that or get more involved in the result by increasing/decreasing its accuracy, brush types, brush stroke length, surface texture, colour, contrast, underpainting, colour palette, paper/canvas colour, outlines, sharpness and many, many more features. Most people, I think, would be happy with the straight default settings that each preset gives - but knowing that anything you see can be further modified - if you have the time or patience - is a great advantage. I sometimes blend two different results into one master image to get a combination of effects that a single effect might not achieve. Printing the result onto textured inkjet watercolour paper only makes the effect that much more impressive.