Drawing, Writing on a Neg.

Eirebear

Hullo folks, long time no chat.

A drunken conversation with a friend a few days ago led to a a few questions for us, he himself is a comic book artist and was wondering if it was possible to do some sort of collaborative experiment (for us at least) where he was to draw directly upon the developed negative prior to printing.

In theory, i assume this would work - i've seen plenty of "Lost" prints that have been marked with a big red X when the photographer has originally discounted them. However would something with a bit more detail work in a similar fashion?

Google (And other searches) havnt really helped me here so my questions are simple.

What would be the best utensil for drawing, or even painting, directly onto the film in order to stop it from smudging as much as possible.
Also, there must be someone out there doing stuff like this - can anyone point me in their direction?

magicbastarder

if you want to draw lettering on a neg which would appear black, you'd need something to remove the emulsion - drawing on a neg with a black marker would obviously result in white writing once printed.
i can't see why you can't draw on the non-emulsion side with a thin black marker, though.

DaireQuinlan

Little more complicated than that I think. Anything opaque (regardless of colour) on the neg will come up as white on the scan or print. To get something completely black you have to bleach out the existing silver. You could apply it with a very fine brush I guess, though you might have to go over and over to reduce dense areas sufficiently. Normal bleach won't work, you need something like potassium ferricyanide or something, and then re-fix I think.

DaireQuinlan

also, as an addendum, probably goes without saying that the bigger the neg the better. 6x9cm would be a good size, would contact print nicely to the size of one cartoon panel as well on an 8x10. Pick up some old 6x9 folder on Ebay. Good alternative would be to shoot some variety of instant film, instax or fuji peel apart, and you could just draw directly onto the shot.

Eirebear

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

also, as an addendum, probably goes without saying that the bigger the neg the better. 6x9cm would be a good size, would contact print nicely to the size of one cartoon panel as well on an 8x10. Pick up some old 6x9 folder on Ebay. Good alternative would be to shoot some variety of instant film, instax or fuji peel apart, and you could just draw directly onto the shot.

I've been messing around a little with some 5x7 i was donated by a friend a while back. (With varying results!)

That's pretty much where the conversation started from as it would be, in theory, be plenty of space for him to get some detail into any illustrations he added.
It seems though that we may need to look at things slightly differently though, through trial and error.

I wonder if he could maybe line the sketches with a very thin marker before then using the bleach process to shade?

I think at this stage it's going to look fairly primative no matter what, but it could be fun finding out what can be done!

Promac

You could probably do it easier with slide film (positive, not negative). Bit harder to get prints from them but a bit easier to do the drawing.

Technique would be the same as this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawn-on-film_animation