Lost and Found Department

One day not so long ago a referral client walked in with a big black plastic garbage bag, you know, the giant Costco type. From the bag, she pulled a flattened cardboard box onto which was taped a ripped-up and badly faded old pencil illustration. The client had heard about our restoration work at Vashon Island Imaging and she was asking for help with this one. I found myself in a conundrum. We love new business but this was going to be quite an undertaking and it was clear that the client could not afford the work that needed to be done.

Using a medical paradigm I tried to explain it in terms she might understand... that this patient needed a quintuple bypass and multiple organ replacement. She got the idea. But what to do?

In the end I took on the job... as a challenge because to be honest, I wasn't sure myself if I could pull it off. Now I am happy to have a new portfolio piece, thanks to Lucrezia.



The job took 14 hours which was roughly divided in half by the two primary repairs... replacing paper rips and missing pieces with parts fabricated from cannibalized bits of the original... and then lifting the faded image out by carefully controlling the highlights and dark tones in a repetitive process that gradually creates (recreates) tones where seemingly none exist.

The process hearkens back to film processing and print making and is described in my book Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée. Any photographer who has ever printed an extremely underexposed negative will be familiar with what has to happen. Using a series of contrast masks the image is coaxed out of 'latency' into visibility.

All the work was done at 150% scale... the original is 17 X 27 and so I worked at a size of 24 X 38 (based on 240dpi which is the preferred resolution for the Epson giclée printer we would eventually output to.

After the rip work and general clean-up and before tone building the image was sharpened at settings of 2.2 / 222 / 0. After tone building it was brought down to repro size (17 X 27) and sharpened again (same settings).

A very fine cross-hatch effect was applied to mask the 'blotchiness' of the image caused by surface abrasion of the illustration paper texture... the paper's surface was unevenly rubbed off in many places. The result was a sort of extremely blotchy graininess. A light touch of cross-hatch on a separate layer, blended in 'just so' helped create a new 'patina' that was more appealing.

I decided not to do the paper outside the area of the bust because the contrast between the lost and found parts of the image are so striking that it aids in the telling of the story behind the picture. It turns out that it is a portrait of an elderly migrant masseuse... a modern day hobo, when he was a young man in New Orleans. He travels with a fold-up massage table and a small suitcase and no more. People take him in and help him along his ambling trail. Lucrezia is one of those generous people.

After Lucrezia got to know the man, he one day showed her this tattered treasure, the only thing left from his faded past... the illustration Lucrezia brought to us in pieces for salvage. He had carried it with him through the years, taped to the bottom of the massage table. As I held the picture in my hands I could not begin to imagine the karma it possessed. If water has memory then surely illustrations and artworks do as well. And if this illustrated bust could speak, imagine the stories it could tell... of things in life that are lost and found.