Hand Tinting

I have got myself some watercolours and some Ilford FB and I will shortly be trying my hand at tinting. One question straight away if there's anyone to help.

I've read it's better to apply watercolour to wet or damp FB than dry, so is it best to tint whilst drying first time or do you let paper dry then wet it again?

In my experience there is no real difference in wet first time and wet again, but I have never used watercolors to tint prints so take it for what it's worth. Marshalls' oils are are more controllable method of tinting images. You can remove color and have greater control over where it goes in the first place when using them. With watercolor, the paint tends to flow and be less manageable, at least on watercolor paper and in my experience.

When the whole sheet is wet and you apply color, it tends to flow out over all of the wet area of the paper. To control where it goes, you try to wet only the areas you want to color unless you are doing a wash. Having said that, I am by no means a watercolor artist, just someone trying to learn. Working with FB paper could be totaly different, but it seems like it would behave similarly...

- Randy

One more thing. Colors appear more 'natural looking', for want of a better term, when they are applied to a print that has some overall tint, like one that was lightly toned with sepia for example. There are some good books on the subject out there, but I can't get you the titles since I am at work. PM me if you would like the title of the books that I have at home and I will reply when I get back.

- Randy

I've done hand coloring quite a bit. My experience is that water colors are not that easy to use - or perhaps more correctly, I found that it's much more difficult to achieve the result that I want using watercolors.

My preference is for subtle, evenly blended pastel colors and for the sense that color is an inherent element deeply embedded in the image. To my eye, water colors sit on top of the image and are too obvious.

I usually use color pencils. I apply the color by gently rubbing the print with the side of sharpened pencils, and then blending and smoothing the color using balls of cotton, commercial cotton swabs, or for really fine work, bits of cotton wound around toothpicks. I have found that using a solution like Marshall's PMS helps prepare the print surface to accept pencil. By the way, I only use matte surface fiber base paper. My pencils are a collection of Marshall's photo pencils, and a large selection of other color pencils that I have picked up at various artists' supply stores.

I've also used some oil paint, especially in instances where there are large fields that require color (eg portrait backgrounds). The basic application principle is the same, although oil paints tend to be much messier to work with. The best paints I have found are Marshall's transparent photo oils, but I have also used ordinary opaque oil paints mixed with transparentizing solutions.

Google Richard Prehn AKA "Zxorb" to see EXTREME hand coloring with marshal oil

I've used Nichol's (I believe that's the name) water colours for photographs and find them easy and quick once you get the hang of them. I use them on a dry print as they could tend to bleed into and area you don't want to colour if the whole print is wet and you are working on a small subject area as reellis67 mentioned. You have to build up the colour a bit at a time with watercolours because by the time you realise you have applied too much - it's too late to take it off. I save my test strips to practise on when I'm going to do a print in watercolour.