Techniques for Using and Altering Vintage Black & White Images

Specifically, I am talking about old photographs printed in books or in magazines or in newspapers that are quite old. The picture below (about 2 1/2 x 3) was from an old book (1940s?) on cheap slick paper. It was pretty gray looking with very little contrast but I loved the image so I played with my colored pencils (watercolor pencils or the soft ones like Derwent work really well) until I liked what I had. Very neat image considering the original was poor quality and seemed like a "throw-away."

 

For the image of the woman below, I used a grainy newspaper photograph (1930s). I loved her face and silhouette but it was too grainy to and "gray" with little contrast for me to use. One thing you can do in this case is to scan the image in (I increased the contrast a bit) and print it onto paper or another document, like the sheet music used here. I cut the sheet music to the size of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet and it went right through. THEN the magic is in using a watercolor brush and water (sparingly) to get the inkjet inks to run. They are not water fast, and can create some wonderful effects. Hard to know just when to stop, but can create some delightful effects. For the final collage I added some words and a small rectangle with a real pressed butterfly.