OK, look, it's like Bruce said: These "translucents" are NOT new. There
is no mystery to them. They are simply high-grade acrylic artist's
paints. Basically, they are liquid plastic color. You can buy them in
any art supply store (and in the crafts section at Wal-Mart). They have
been around for a long time, but in recent decades they have improved
tremendously in quality. I'm a painter (meaning artist, not house
painter). I've been using acrylics since the 1960's, with both
traditional brushes and air-brushing.
Acrylic artist's paint comes out of the tube opaque, but the more water
you add, the more translucent the color becomes. You can also mix a
small amount of the color with a clear plastic "gel" to get even more
transparency with less water -- which is what they do when using them on
poster paper so there is no risk of the paper "wrinkling up" from excess
water. With an airbrush and acrylics you can do some incredibly subtle
things -- you can simulate the look of stone lithography and offset
printing very accurately. Acrylics are famous in the art world for
painters using them to "build up layers" of color and transparency to
achieve rich textures and lighting effects. Commercial artists swear by
them.
They are, as with any other technique, only as good at the talent of the
artist using them. In clumsy hands you will get bad/obvious results. In
a true artist's hands you can get something most experts would be hard
pressed to recognize as non-original "ink" and even if it were
suspected, it would be hard to prove without doing a chemical analysis
of the paper to reveal the "plastic content" of the color.
But here's the thing:
Acrylics are PERMANENT. Once they dry, they are part of the paper
forever. This goes against the basic principles of restoration -- that
anything done to the poster should be reversible.
What we are talking about doing here is OVER-PAINTING the existing
printer's ink of a poster with a layer of plastic color which is then
absorbed into the paper. But it is still over-painting and if done over
more than a very tiny area of the poster it is just not cool.
By the way, you could do the exact same thing with diluted water colors
-- ever see a water color painting that had a light "wash" of color over
the sky or water? Same thing. The difference is that with water color
you run the risk of the paper "wrinkling up" from the excess water a
very diluted water color paint requires. And, of course, water colors
*are* reversible. In fact, any expert could tell if the colors of a
poster had been "punched up" with watercolors by taking a cotton-tipped
swab or paint brush, dipping it in water and rubbing lightly on the
suspected area of the poster. If it were watercolor, it would streak and
run. But if the touch-up was done with acrylic paint it would not --
just as it would not if it were original printer's ink with no
over-painting on it at all.
-- JR
Michael B wrote:
i just received the following email from a MOPO member that rarely
posts, anything, but i have erased the identity and address of the
sender:
*Send it to me, I can pump the colors using the translucents that Todd
mentioned*
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