Entries with tag "bromoil"

I discovered a really interesting photographic process last week called Bromoil. It's a process applied to a black & white photographic print wherein you bleach out the silver (which is what the black parts of a print are composed of) and then treat the paper in a chemical that tans it and causes it to harden in varying degrees, depending on how much silver was originally deposited in that particular spot. In places where the paper is harder, it's less receptive to oil-based ink, so when you apply ink to the paper, the parts of the paper that were dark when you started absorb more of the ink, whereas the parts that were lighter reject it, and it gets wiped away. So you end up with a sort of painting of your photograph, and the result looks awesome (some examples I like by Gene Laughter, Rene Smets, and Jurek Karwowski). The technique was most popular around the turn of the century, but has been kept alive by a small group of artists.

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