Hand Manipulation of Photographs?

A gallery in Asheville, NC has put out a "call for artists" titled "Manipulated." Here is their definition of what they will accept:

MEDIA: All content and photographic media is acceptable — alternative processes, traditional black and white, and/or digital methods, as long as the actual hand of the artist has been employed to manipulate either the negative, the print, or both. Images which have been altered using digital methods are welcome, but only when utilized in addition to physical hand manipulation.

I understand that at some point(I only shoot digital)I must use some sort of process to manipulate, by hand, the printed image. I find this intriguing but I'm not sure where to start. The gallery owner suggested using tools like a bleach pen tool or encaustic tools.

Has anyone done this sort of hand manipulation? Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

One popular method is hand tinting black & white prints. A friend of mine does this, check it out for some ideas. You would probably need to experiment with different papers since I expect you probably won't be using silver gelatin prints. I would think a cotton rag would work nicely though for tinting.

Lon

Hand coloring of prints is an old way of getting color before color prints were stable. I used to do it on portraits many moons ago. More recently I have printed B&W photos on art papers and added either watercolor, colored pencil or pastel pencil accents. In a few cases I have done some coloring/tinting in Photoshop before printing on the art paper. Such works are one of a kind prints. Like prints from a wet darkroom no two are exactly alike and some buyers feel that makes them more valuable as well as unique. It certainly allows the photographer a lot of leeway in how he/she works because you are working across multiple mediums.

Addendum: I just posted a scan of a completed watercolor/photo on the Photo Art galleries.

Try using established normal canvas tools like oil colors, inks, brushes, etc or adding elements found in the photograph, like real rocks and leaves and grass, etc!

Lon, Jim and Troup - thanks for all the links and information. I really appreciate it. My printer will print on watercolor paper so I will order that and give it a try.

Jim, I checked out your recent post and it's lovely. Give me hope. Thanks again for this information. This is new territory for me, but it is something I definitely want to try.

Thanks again.

Manipulation does need to limit the possibilities to just bleach or tinting. It could mean anything from partially destroying the print to lifting the print or creating transparency layers or creating collage images by hand.

You could also look into carbon printing, or printing out a negative onto a transparency and creating a print by hand coating your paper with platinum, cyanotype, bromide or any number of print out methods.

You could add paint to your print, or add texture with a gelatin.

Just some alternative ideas.