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Public Domain header images & digital restoration of old paintings


neverrmind
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I'd really like to show you guys my work !
I am a digital artist by trade and paint peoples pets for living (Or, a few times I have even painted my character's pets) but I also have a little hobby in colourizing and repurposing public domain paintings.  This essentially means taking something old and making it new. This is how I made graphics for my site, and I am asked almost twice a day where I got my site's header - I am here to tell you where!

 

Restoration is a process almost all old paintings will eventually go through, but restoration and reconstruction of a single painting takes a professional (usually someone who has extensively studied art history + restoration and works for a museum or a university) weeks or even months depending on the damage. Very often these works are trapped beneath over centuries of old varnish which leaves them looking discoloured and not at all how the original artist envisioned them. Thankfully photoshop can bring life back to them without touching the original piece (let us not forget the botched "restoration" of Ecce Homo)

 

My site's header image is a colourized version of a very old, very discoloured piece curated by the Rijksmuseum in Holland - we, the internet, are very lucky to have access to their collections through the public domain and free use at Rijksstudio, though! 

BEFORE YOU USE AN IMAGE FROM RIJKSTUDIO, or any site that offers to provide you with images, please check the lisence - either Public Domain, Personal Use, or Attribution lisences - public domain is best, though. 


If you are interested in learning how to do this yourself I would be happy to create a tutorial on colourisation, or also explain image licencing and the various lisences so you can learn about which images you can use and build upon freely without breaching copyrights - Consider this post an expression of interest!

 

http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7521 - scroll for object data of this piece incl. lisence
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en - Image licence of the ORIGINAL (not of the colourized piece which belongs to me.)

 

 

The Original: Boslandschap bij maanlicht by Georg Eduard Otto Saal, 1861
(Public domain, no copyright)

orig.jpg

 

My Colorized version:

(This belongs to me)

colorize.jpg


 

Super stoked admin at

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