My First Job

Ironically my first job involved photographs. When I left school at the end of '74 I started a career at Christopher Bede Photography Studios in Khyber Pass as an airbrush artist. The studio had dominated the home-based portrait photography business in New Zealand for 20 years. Unfortunately I came in at the end of those 20 years, but I had a wonderful 6 mths or so earning under $50 per week colouring in black and white portrait photographs. I hear you laughing. At both those statements. How it worked was the portraits were taken in b&w (although as I recall they looked more sepia tone) then were developed to the requested size, mounted and brought to us for painting. We sat at big easels with airbrush guns and pallets, waiting for our photo and all the necessary details: eye colour, skin tone and real snippets of the peoples hair & clothing. If we were lucky (or unlucky) we would get a large family and lots of paisley shirts. I can also remember clearly the neon paints available such as morglo pink and rocket red required for some of the hideous clothes we wore in those days. We would then spend the day mixing up colours, filling the airgun cup and spraying the paint onto the photograph with the help of masking (not on our face - these were cardboard templates of different shapes which we held against the photo to stop over spray and assist with the lines and curves in the picture). The intricate patterns such as paisley and smaller bits were hand painted. Now aware of the process and effort taken, I would notice a lot of these airbrushed portraits in friends homes for years to come. I can't say I ever saw one I personally did though. Later when involved in the racehorse industry I also noticed airbrushed photos of racehorses. There was also a task involving any B&W photos which weren't to be coloured but still needed touching up, called 'spotting'. This involved getting rid of any blemishes (normally showing as white spots or marks) by mixing up paint to match the surrounding colour, and then with a very fine paint brush delicately doing minute spots until the mark had disappeared and the blemish became invisible. I found this technique really useful for changing my DOB on my drivers licence so that I could get into pubs at an early age. It never failed :-) Then, you guessed it, proper coloured portrait photography arrived and I was out of a job. But it was the most awesome first job. brb

#Job #artist #photographs #colourprints #airbrushing