Hand Coloring Photos

First things first . . . I have always enjoyed vintage baseball and old photography, and over the years I found myself drawn to the nearly forgotten art of hand coloring. I don’t consider myself a traditional artist in the mold of baseball painters like Craig Kreindler or Ron Stark, nor am I a digital photo colorist creating lifelike restorations in Photoshop. My work falls somewhere in between — part photography, part painting, and part historical interpretation.

The medium itself is something of a lost art. Long before computers made digital restoration possible, photographs were often colored by hand to soften the starkness of early black-and-white images and bring a little warmth and life back into them. That process fascinated me then, and it still does today.

Hand Coloring: A Forgotten Art Form

Hand coloring has its origins with the advent of early photography in the mid-19th century. The harshness of the early daguerreotype photos troubled the public. A prime example of this is captured in the work of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady who brought the horror of war home. Hand coloring, or tinting as it was called back then, was a technique used to help soften these rough realities and often would embellish the effect of the overall photo.

Hand coloring took a hit around the 1930’s when color photography started to become popular. As the cost and quality of color photography improved, hand coloring’s popularity faded.

Hand coloring experienced a renaissance in the 1970’s and 1980’s courtesy of the advertising industry as hand coloring artists were plying their art to produce loud, eye-catching, creative works. Think Saturday Night Live where photographer Edie Baskin created “bumper” images that were used before and after the show’s commercial breaks. As an amateur photographer, this is when I first became interested in hand coloring some of my B&W photographs. Later, I expanded my hand coloring to century-old family photos and eventually to vintage baseball.

In those old days, hand coloring was a fairly straight-forward process: find a quality B&W lab that can print your image on to a quality fiber-based paper using a matte finish. Then apply Marshall’s Oils with cotton swabs to complete the painting. But as time passed, black & white photo labs became scarce and digitized images replaced photographic paper. For all I know, Marshall’s Oil is no longer in business. In the new millennium, hand coloring photographic images slowly faded to a thing of the past.

My Rediscovery of Hand Painting

In 2020, along with many others, I found I had a lot time on my hands. COVID had sidelined my other passions (running in organized foot races and volunteering at my local zoo). So, I decided to give hand coloring another try - it should be easy, right? There are plenty of vintage baseball photos in the public domain, so it seemed all I needed was to find a good photo lab that could produce quality black & white photos on fiber board and then refresh my Marshall’s Oil paint collection. Unfortunately, technology conspired against me.

I spend several hours searching for a neighborhood photo lab. Even worse, I was unable to locate a reliable source for Marshall Oil’s paints. This was not going to be easy. My next step was a long conversation with a sales rep at Dick Blick’s Art Supply who told me what I was doing was similar to ‘glazing’, an old artistic technique of applying transparent oil paint on to an image to alter and enhance the underlying image. After several more hours of Internet research, I found a technique referred to as ‘grisaille’, an art technique used by the Dutch masters. Back then, oil paint was expensive, and one way around this cost issue was to create a grayscale under layer, let it dry, apply a fixative to prevent bleeding of the under layer and then enhance the fixed grayscale image using transparent oil paint. I was encouraged to find that Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was painted using this technique. It sounded like a solution.

Over the next few months I experimented with variations of paper and canvas, fixatives and oil paints before I came up with a working solution. My solution was to find a digital image in the public domain and print it with an ink jet printer on to coated canvas. Red River Blanco Matte Canvas is my preferred choice as it is pre-coated, requires no fixative and creates a sharp grayscale, under-layer image. Next paint over the grayscaled under-layer image using transparent oil paint. I use Schmincke Mussini transparent oil paints and will sprinkle in a few Marshall Oil’s that are left over from years past. For fine details, like Yankee pinstripes, I use Prismacolor pencils.

A few other side points that may be of interest:

• I use a special type of Q-tip instead of paint brushes to apply oil paint. I find the cotton on Q-tips removes almost all brush strokes and gives a satin-smooth finish.

• Often application of the first transparent oil paint layer appears faded and pale. To remedy this, I will let the layer of oil paint dry and then apply additional layers to get the desired color shade, richness and intensity.

• I use a product called Liquin as a thinning medium for the oil paint. Not only does it help the paint spread more evenly, it greatly speeds up the drying time of recently applied oil paint layer.

So, back to my original point: I’m simply someone who enjoys baseball history, old photographs, and the process of bringing these images back to life through hand coloring. What began as a personal creative outlet gradually turned into something I truly enjoy sharing with others.

Every painting is still a bit of an experiment, and I continue to learn something new with each piece. That’s part of the fun of working in a medium that sits somewhere between photography and painting — and one that, for all practical purposes, has nearly disappeared in the digital age..