If you want to paint on top of photographs what type of paint do you use?

Answer 1

I have no special knowledge in this area, but I once knew someone who used regular artists oil paints to paint on photographs. I would assume you could also use acrylic paints, except they dry faster making them a little harder to work with. Another Answer: The above is correct. Marshall's Photo Oils are a good place to start, but many media can be used to color or tint photographs, including but not limited to artist's oil paints, colored pencils, markers, pastels watercolors, dyes and acrylics. Any or all can be applied to a photograph. Very generally, the medium should be fairly translucent if you want the details of the original photograph to show through, but some workers completely cover the photo, using it like a paint-by-numbers template. Hand coloring became sadly neglected after the development of color Photography, but it's an exciting, unique art form with unlimited potential, and not by any means limited to black and white (monochrome) prints. Let your imagination be your guide.

I was never a colorist myself, but I spent many years making professional studio portraits, specializing in black and white. I had a wonderful colorist who hand tinted many of my pictures. Her medium of choice was Marshall's oils. She preferred a fiber base paper with a heavy texture such as Kodak "R" or "X," and wanted the pictures gold or sepia toned. The challenge today is that most if not all of these fiber based heavily textured papers are discontinued. Colorists today will have to improvise.

Since my colorist was tinting rather than covering the original image, her method was to cover the entire picture with an oil medium such as Marshall's PMS (this gives the surface a "tooth" that takes the color smoothly), then work the oil into the surface using cotton balls and swabs. Rarely if ever did she use a brush except on fine detail. But it depends on the effect you want and the sky is the limit. One approach is to make multiple prints and try different things until you see something you like.

A hand tinted or painted photograph has a completely unique look that is hard to duplicate with color film or even in digital. The substrate (original photograph) we habitually made was a long scale (normal contrast) black and white print on archival heavily textured fiber paper which was sepia toned for underlying warmth, although it is possible to apply paint or other media to any photograph on any material. In the 19th Century it was common to hand tint Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes (on glass) and tintypes (ferrotypes). Many of these have survived, and it's common to see old pictures with just a little red color rubbed into the cheeks. Properly finished archival fiber prints tinted in oils should last for centuries.

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