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Not that it's super important, but I've wanted to be able to use my original Marshall's Photo Oils again for hand painting B&W images, for many years.
These photo oils were designed and intended for use on silver gelatin prints from a darkroom. I have darkroom equipment that I've been unable to set up in my last 2 homes due to space restrictions. Typical inkjet prints, even from a photo printer using pigmented inks, don't accept these oils as the paper usually grabs the medium and leaves you with a glob of a mess as you watch the oils sink in - no blending can be done on the surface of a typical matte or semi-matte inkjet photo paper. You have to have some kind of ground since oil and paper don't mix.
Since I started playing with collage, I've bought different gel mediums for gluing and sealing, and it occurred to me that a liquid gel medium should be able to create the necessary ground/barrier and actual oils should glide right over. (Gesso was an early consideration but somewhat dry, stiff and lacking in smoothness on photo inkjet papers.)
So I tried fluid gel medium it and it worked! We have a few different brands of inkjet photo papers laying around, and I picked Canson Aquarelle since it has nice texture - perfect for hand coloring. After letting the print sit for awhile to make sure it was completely dry, I applied Liquitex fluid matte gel medium with a foam brush over the print in two directions, and then let it dry a couple of hours.
I had picked a photo from a recent roll that had good, even tonal range, not a lot of fussy detail, simply to make the hand coloring go faster.
The road to Point Pelee:
I actually prefer this as a B&W image, since it's infrared film. But I was going for the even tonal range, so it won the turkey. Here's that version:
Anyway, the result makes me happy because it lets me play and experiment further with photo oils - the ground is the thing. So - huzzah!
All comments welcomed and appreciated. Thanks for looking!
These photo oils were designed and intended for use on silver gelatin prints from a darkroom. I have darkroom equipment that I've been unable to set up in my last 2 homes due to space restrictions. Typical inkjet prints, even from a photo printer using pigmented inks, don't accept these oils as the paper usually grabs the medium and leaves you with a glob of a mess as you watch the oils sink in - no blending can be done on the surface of a typical matte or semi-matte inkjet photo paper. You have to have some kind of ground since oil and paper don't mix.
Since I started playing with collage, I've bought different gel mediums for gluing and sealing, and it occurred to me that a liquid gel medium should be able to create the necessary ground/barrier and actual oils should glide right over. (Gesso was an early consideration but somewhat dry, stiff and lacking in smoothness on photo inkjet papers.)
So I tried fluid gel medium it and it worked! We have a few different brands of inkjet photo papers laying around, and I picked Canson Aquarelle since it has nice texture - perfect for hand coloring. After letting the print sit for awhile to make sure it was completely dry, I applied Liquitex fluid matte gel medium with a foam brush over the print in two directions, and then let it dry a couple of hours.
I had picked a photo from a recent roll that had good, even tonal range, not a lot of fussy detail, simply to make the hand coloring go faster.
The road to Point Pelee:
I actually prefer this as a B&W image, since it's infrared film. But I was going for the even tonal range, so it won the turkey. Here's that version:
Anyway, the result makes me happy because it lets me play and experiment further with photo oils - the ground is the thing. So - huzzah!
All comments welcomed and appreciated. Thanks for looking!