Week 4 Art Restoration with Kat and Megan

The start of this week has been full of new art restoration experiences. Someone had rust damaged pieces that we couldn’t fix by chemical processes, so Megan turned to my experience with Photoshop to fix the art. The art I was photoshopping was caricatures of famous artists sitting together at a bar, in several large prints. George Gershwin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Marilyn Monroe, and Groucho Marx were stylized excellently in rough pencil strokes. Because the prints were fairly large, I had to use the skills I learned last year in Digital Imaging to scan them in pieces and puzzle them together. Then came copying tiny bits of clean paper to cover the rust damaged paper, rotating and warping them to blend into the art. Sometimes I would have to select just one pencil stroke so that I could more smoothly transition the doctored pieces. The most fun Photoshop project was fixing the rust damaged baby portrait. Megan put a before and after post on Instagram that really showcases my hard work—@artrecoverynnj. The portrait had a lot of tiny white rips in the paper that I covered with copied bits of nearby color, and a few large rusty splashes. Sometimes I would have to go in with a dry bristle brush preset and blend the edges to match the gradient-filled and textured background. It was hard but fun work, and lasted me the first half of Monday.

The other new technique we used was for some smoke damaged clay sculptures. Megan had read online that the use of agar-agar (an algae-based gelatin commonly used for vegan jelly candies and cheesecake) could lift dirt from porous rock and clay. So Megan and I grabbed Sherry, who also works in the art department with us, and headed to the kitchen to mix up some agar-agar gelatin. As it became gelatinous, we brushed it onto the sculptures thickly. It was such an interesting substance to work with. As Megan and Sherry continued with the sculptures, I looked up agar-agar recipes. After this week of work is done, I’m thinking of making some vegan soft candy! Although agar-agar might make delicious food, it didn’t end up working very well for our sculptures. The next day when we tried removing it, it had barely alleviated the smoke damage at all. It was very fun to peel, though—kind of like peeling dried Elmer’s glue from your hands. 

More updates at the end of the week!