Project ZELK
- Watch me restore the picture.
Background
I first painted this image in the
early 1970s, because I had a passing fascination with abstract
or illusory black and white images. The painting is
long since lost but I had the foresight to take a photograph
of it at some time, probably about 1975 when I got my second
SLR camera. Unfortunately the original photograph
is very poor quality due to inadequate lighting - nothing
more sophisticated than a tungsten light bulb, as I recall
- though the quality of the photographic medium has retained
as much of the original detail as the poor technique and
lighting would allow. The photograph was taken on
Agfa 50 ASA transparency film - my favourite then due to
its speed and cost advantage over Kodachrome 25, the other
main rival for my hard-earned cash. Anyway, the lighting
had the effect of yellowing the image and lighting it very
unevenly, meaning that much of the detail in the black has
been lost. To make matters worse, the original painting
was already damaged by the time I photographed it - some
of the white had been knocked
or rubbed off.
Fortunately,
I can remember almost every detail of the picture as if
I had painted it yesterday - partly because of the therapeutic effect creating
it had on me at a particularly difficult time in my life
and partly because it took me so long to do! I know
it's no masterpiece, in fact it's hardly art at all! The
base was plain hardboard, which I painted with white gloss
paint (the sort you normally paint your skirting boards
with) whilst the black was Humbrol enamel. The transitions
between the black and white were as sharp as I could make
them by hand using a sable brush and given the consistency
of enamel paint. Unfortunately much of the sharpness
has been lost in the transformation via slide film to scanned
computer image 30 years later.
Re-creation
I suddenly got a notion to re-create
the picture - no simple task, given the foregoing. So
far I've done the following jobs:
- Scanned in the original image at
2880dpi
- Transformed it back to a black
and white image
- Adjusted contrast, midtones, shadows
and applied unsharp mask quite ruthlessly
- Cleaned up most of the imperfections
in the large flowing white areas
- Begun to fill in some of the missing
depth in the black areas
Much remains to be done to sharpen
up all the black/ white transitions. All this is being
done by hand in the hope that it will achieve a similar
result to the original image. Over the next few months
I'll post updates to the project on this site.
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