Hand Painted Nail Designs Biography

(Source google.com)

Hand-colouring (or hand-coloring) refers to any method of manually adding colour to ablack-and-white photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the photograph or for artistic purposes. Hand-colouring is also known as hand painting or overpainting. Typically, watercolours, oils, crayons or pastels, and other paints or dyes are applied to the image surface using brushes, fingers, cotton swabs or airbrushes. Hand-coloured photographs were most popular in the mid- to late-19th century before the invention of colour photography and some firms specialized in producing hand-coloured photographs. Monochrome (black and white) photography was first exemplified by the daguerreotype in 1839 and later improved by other methods including: calotype, ambrotype, tintype, albumen print and gelatin silver print. The majority of photography remained monochrome until the mid-20th century, although experiments were producing color photography as early as 1855 and some photographic processes produced images with an inherent overall colour like the blue of cyanotypes.

In an attempt to create more realistic images, photographers and artists would hand-colour monochrome photographs. The first hand-coloured daguerreotypes are attributed to Swiss painter and printmaker Johann Baptist Isenring, who used a mixture of gum arabic andpigments to colour daguerreotypes soon after their invention in 1839. Coloured powder was fixed on the delicate surface of the daguerreotype by the application of heat. Variations of this technique were patented in England by Richard Beard in 1842 and in Franceby Étienne Lecchi in 1842 and Léotard de Leuze in 1845. Later, hand-colouring was used with successive photographic innovations, from albumen and gelatin silver prints to lantern slides and transparency photography.

Parallel efforts to produce coloured photographic images had an impact on the popularity of hand-colouring. In 1842 Daniel Davis Jr.patented a method for colouring daguerreotypes through electroplating, and his work was refined by Warren Thompson the following year. The results of the work of Davis and Thompson were only partially successful in creating colour photographs and the electroplating method was soon abandoned. In 1850 Levi L. Hill announced his invention of a process of daguerreotyping in natural colours in hisTreatise on Daguerreotype. Sales of conventional uncoloured and hand-coloured daguerreotypes fell in anticipation of this new technology. Hill delayed publication of the details of his process for several years, however, and his claims soon came to be considered fraudulent. When he finally did publish his treatise in 1856, the process – whether bona fide or not – was certainly impractical and dangerous.

Hand-colouring remained the easiest and most effective method to produce full-colour photographic images until the mid-20th century when American Kodak introduced Kodachrome colour film.

Though the hand-colouring of photographs was introduced in Europe, the technique gained considerable popularity in Japan, where the practice became a respected and refined art form beginning in the 1860s. It is possible that photographer Charles Parker and his artist partner William Parke Andrew were the first to produce such works in Japan, but the first to consistently employ hand-colouring in the country were reporter and photographer Felice Beato andThe Illustrated London News artist and colourist Charles Wirgman. In Beato's studio the refined skills ofJapanese watercolourists and woodblock printmakers were successfully applied to European photography, as evidenced in Beato's volume of hand-coloured portraits, Native Types.

Another notable early photographer in Japan to use hand-colouring wasYokoyama Matsusaburō. Yokoyama had trained as a painter and lithographer as well as a photographer, and he took advantage of his extensive repertoire of skills and techniques to create what or "photographic oil paintings", in which the paper support of a photograph was cut away and oil paints then applied to the remaining emulsion.

Later practitioners of hand-colouring in Japan included the firm of Stillfried & Andersen, which acquired Beato's studio in 1877 and hand-coloured many of his negatives in addition to its own. Austrian Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz, trained Japanese photographer and colorist Kusakabe Kimbei, and together they created hand-coloured images of Japanese daily life that were very popular as souvenirs. Hand-coloured photographs were also produced by Kusakabe Kimbei, Tamamura Kozaburō, Adolfo Farsari,Uchida Kuichi, Ogawa Kazumasa and others. Many high-quality hand-coloured photographs continued to be made in Japan well into the 20th century.

The so-called golden age of hand-coloured photography in the western hemisphere occurred between 1900 and 1940. The increased demand for hand-coloured landscape photography at the beginning of the 20th century is attributed to the work of Wallace Nutting. Nutting, a New England minister, pursued hand-coloured landscape photography as a hobby until 1904, when he opened a professional studio. He spent the next 35 years creating hand-coloured photographs, and became the best-selling hand-coloured photographer of all time. Between 1915 and 1925 hand-coloured photographs were popular among the middle classes in the United States, Canada, Bermuda and the Bahamas as affordable and stylish wedding gifts, shower gifts, holiday gifts, friendship gifts, and vacation souvenirs. With the start of the Great Depression in 1929, and the subsequent decrease in the numbers of the middle class, sales of hand-coloured photographs sharply diminished.

Despite their downturn in popularity, skilled photographers continued to create beautifully hand-coloured photographs. Hans Bellmer's hand-coloured photographs of his own doll sculptures from the 1930s provide an example of continued hand-colouring of photographs in Europe during this time. In Poland, the Monidło is an example of popular hand-coloured wedding photographs. Another hand-colour photographer, Luis Márquez (1899–1978), was the official photographer for and art adviser of the Mexican Pavilion at the 1939-40 World’s Fair. In 1937 he presented Texas Governor James V. Allred a collection of hand-coloured photographs. TheNational Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City has an extensive Luis Márquez photographic archive, as does the University of Houston in Texas. By the 1950s, the availability of colour film all but stopped the production of hand-coloured photographs. The upsurge in popularity of antiques and collectibles in the 1960s, however, increased interest in hand-coloured photographs. Since about 1970 there has been something of a revival of hand-colouring, as seen in the work of such artist-photographers as Elizabeth Lennard, Jan Saudek, Kathy Vargas, and Rita Dibert. Robert Rauschenberg's and others' use of combined photographic and painting media in their art represents a precursor to this revival.

In spite of the availability of high-quality colour processes, hand-coloured photographs (often combined with sepia-toning) are still popular for aesthetic reasons and because the pigments used have great permanence. In many countries where colour film was rare or expensive, or where colour processing was unavailable, hand-colouring continued to be used and sometimes preferred into the 1980s. More recently, digital image processing has been used – particularly in advertising – to recreate the appearance and effects of hand-colouring. Colourisation is now available to the amateur photographer using image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop.