One thing I love about being an artist and working with digital tools is that you can use what you know to help restore old photographs and preserve history. One of my earliest photo restorations was an old, worn photo of my youngest brother Joyner and my cousin Gail. As the work progressed, I decided to color the black and white photo and add some new patterns for clothing. Here are some snapshots of how the restoration progressed. Which picture do you like best?
This was the only baby picture my family had of my youngest brother Joyner. It was small and very damaged. So I decided to use Photoshop to heal my brother’s only surviving baby picture. (He was the cutest, happiest baby ever!)
I got rid of the major cracks and cropped the picture.
I decided to crop the picture further and work on the faces pixel by pixel. It was very tedious work.
OK, so I got happy and decided to replace the background with some fancy wall paper I had created, but then the clothes started to look shabby (and rightly so, we were poor).
I wanted to dress my cousin and brother up in nice clothes (my brother is fond of designer suits), so I created what I thought were some fun patterns to dress my family up. It was kinda like playing with paper dolls. Remember them, girls? I also toned down the background.
The hardest part of this project was selecting the color patterns for their skin. My cousin was fair, and my brother was more brown, so I developed my palette for black people’s skin. (I should patent it, huh?) The eyebrows and teeth were also very, very difficult to do because children’s teeth and eyebrows are very delicate. If there was a way to use half or quarter pixels to paint, I would have loved it. Instead, I just slugged through dot by dot, one pixel at a time. The entire project took many weeks to complete.
By the time I finished the restoration, printed and framed the picture to give to my brother as a birthday gift, I had the entire picture memorized. That Christmas, while watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” I just got up from the sofa, mounted a large wood panel I had already prepped, and painted the picture without once looking at the photo. Joyner gave the digital painting to my Mom, and kept the wood panel painting. So now Joyner has a childhood picture and one of his sister’s first paintings. I expanded my family treasures, no small part of which was my imagination, and it all started with a mouse.
What would you have done differently?
– Verneda Lights
© 2012 Verneda Lights. All Rights Reserved.
