Art Videos

In this narrated real-time tutorial I am hand coloring a San Diego North County seascape with watercolors. I call this image "Del Mar Surfers": I took the photo from Del Mar, California, looking north with a long lens. You can still see the power plant smokestack in Carlsbad in the background (which has been taken down now) and the old concrete stairs in Solana Beach at Del Mar Terrace, which have been replaced.

In this tutorial I'm hand tinting a 1889 Smith Premier Typewriter on inkjet paper with diluted oils. This typewriter is sitting on a desk in the Wheaton and Hollis hotel in the ghost town of Bodie in California. Initially I was planning to hand tint this image with acrylics, but to stay within the late 1800's theme I went with oils. Oils glazes that is. In order to do that on inkjet paper (this is Breathing Color Vibrance matte photo paper), you first need to treat it. First, I mounted it on a backboard with a self-adhesive (you can actually skip this step, it just gives it some support and prevents warping of the paper), then I sprayed it with Golden Gloss Archival Varnish to fix the inks. In the next step I brushed on an acrylic medium (Gloss Glazing Liquid). This seals the photo and on this coating you can now color with either acrylic or oil glazes.

In this video, I am hand coloring a black and white photograph of a Dutch bike in Maastricht with diluted oils on inkjet paper. This is a nice alternative to Marshall Photo Oils. Marshall Photo Oils were created in the early 1900's for hand coloring black and white photos, but in this video I'll show you how you can use regular oil paint to color your own black and white photos. Furthermore, you can print them with an inkjet printer. I took this photo in 2014 when I visited Maastricht - the town I grew up near - in the Netherlands. This bike was placed against a fence next to the Basilica of Saint Servatius, which construction started in the 11th century.

This tutorial shows the hand coloring of a large b&w photo on canvas with oils and acrylics. This is the view from Del Mar to Torrey Pines in Southern California. I also include a bit of the photo shoot in the beginning of the video and the framing in the end. When I was still working at the University of California in San Diego and lived in Del Mar, this view was part of my commute: driving over Highway 101 along the Pacific Coast to La Jolla. There was a storm coming in - which brought quite a bit of rain and wind over the weekend - and thought the clouds at sunset would give a nice contribution to this scene. I painted in the sky between the clouds with opaque oil paint (and used a little bit of liquin to speed up the drying time). I blended the sky paint with the clouds in the photo with clear liquin. The ocean was colored with transparent acrylic paint (a mix of phthalo blue and acrylic medium). I Because liquin has a bit of a tint to it, I cannot get a really nicely saturated blue transparent oil paint, and thus use acrylics. The rest of the photo was colored with transparent oils. This technique is called hand coloring black and white photographs or hand tinting black and white photographs. The photo was printed on Breathing Color's Gloss Crystalline Canvas with my Epson P20000 using black and gray inks. To color the photo, I am using both oils and acrylics that I dilute with liquin and acrylic medium, respectively. My favorite brushes are a variety of soft flat brushes.

In this narrated tutorial I am hand coloring a black and white photo with acrylics of Torrey Pines State Beach in La Jolla, California. This is my photo which I call "People of Torrey Pines", which I took in 2011. It is one of my first photos of Torrey Pines when I started on my beach themes. The photo shows four permanent lifeguard towers with the bluffs of Torrey Pines in the back. Further back the Scripps pier can be seen and behind that Mount Soledad.

In this real-time tutorial my daughter Kate are having fun in demonstrating to you the process of hand coloring with Marshall Photo Oils a black and white photo of the view from the steps above Grandview Beach in Leucadia, California (my photo is titled "Grand View Palms").

This is my piece "People of Ponto", at South Carlsbad State Beach. The photo is here presented as a quintych: five photos that I also like to overlap. These are photos that were printed with a light jet on resin-coated matte Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper. Marshall Photo Oils work very well with this type of paper as you can also easily remove the paint: when they're dry with cotton rounds or swabs and when they're wet with a turpentine or turpentine-like solution (Marshall's has their own "P.M. Solution"). Marshall Photo Oils are dedicated translucent oil colors for hand coloring (or hand tinting) black and white photos.

In this tutorial both Kate and I will take you through the process of hand coloring a black and white photo with pastels of a cable car at its turnaround/turntable. This technique is either called hand coloring black and white photographs or hand tinting black and white photographs. We will use soft pastel sticks in combination with cotton swabs and pastel pencils. The photo was printed at 18x12 inches with my Epson printer on a piece of matte paper. The paper is 12 mil thick and weighs 230 gsm. It’s not your regular photo paper, but rather paper that is used to draw on, paper with a tooth. The cool thing about this technique is that you can print your own black and white photos with your inkjet printer and color them with pastels.

A quick overview of a variety of techniques I demonstrate on my channel on hand coloring black and white photos. My channel has tutorials on how to color black and white photos with oils on canvas, acrylics on canvas, acrylics on photo paper, oils on photo paper and pastels on paper.

This is not your ordinary time lapse of hand coloring black and white photos. It's actually a stop motion recording of when I hand colored a 1967 Volkswagen bus on the beach, taking two photos each time I put down a drop of paint. One is with my hand and the other without my hand.