I’m figuring out, at last, how to use digital black and white carbon prints for hand coloring.

Turns out the carbon pigment is well bound to the paper — mostly. So what you need to do is remove the loose particles.

About 30 seconds under cool running water and an all-over scouring with a paintbrush seems to do the trick without noticeably affecting the quality of the print. Most of the ink is tightly attached to the watercolor paper. You can see a trickle of loose ink  flow off the page, though.

I then dry the print and give it a spray of workable fixative before painting. That’s a step I would like to skip, if I can perfect the scrubbing; I hate the smell of fixative.

But the scrubbing works.

Painting on the watercolor paper is very different from painting on the smooth, non-absorbent surface of a traditional silver-gelatin print. It will take me a while to get used to the new process.

photo: Twilight in the garden, digital black and white, 2010