Gerards Colorbook

Wolfheeze, Netherlands. 1944 Operation Market Garden

Schiphol circa 1936

Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina (1943-1949)

Netherlands

Pan American Airways (PAA) Sikorsky S-40 Clipper, Ca 1931

Dominican Republic with 1st roundel

[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:”none”,”data-attachmentid”:”3861437″,”data-size”:”full”}[/ATTACH] Kingdom of Yemen (1916-1962).
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Wright Bros.
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Small escort carriers were used well into the 60s, not for flight operations but to ferry aircraft, especially in the days before AAR became common or types without the capability or helicopters.
F-102s were retrofitted with it in the late 69s, so that dates the photo somewhat.
My guess is they’re enroute to Hawaii or the Philippines.
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Klan Airways? You need to provide a bit more context here! The reverse swastika on the tail is quite an interesting addition.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ku_Klux_Klan_members,_March_17,_1922.jpg

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edit: Discovered a mayor mistake. Have to redo this one.

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non aircraft related but interesting:
Den Burg, Texel, Netherlands. 1945. On April 4 the Russian (Georgian) uprising started on the occupied island. The Georgians were hoping to overrun the Germans but it ended in a battle that lastet to May 20.Well beyond the date of the German surrender in Europe. This forgotten battle was the last in Europe during the 2nd WW.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_uprising_on_Texel[url]

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Sweden 1914/15

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USS Card departs San Francisco, CA with a load of cocooned F-102 Delta Dagger fighters on the wooden WWII flight deck (between 1962 and 1970)
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Naah not the KKK – the flight attendants were an ugly bunch 😀

Klan Airways? You need to provide a bit more context here! The reverse swastika on the tail is quite an interesting addition.

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1922

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Sergey Ilyushin (right) and Andrei Tupolev (left)

I agree. It is not easy to find the right color to make it “real” The Schneider picture was more a fun project. Funny enough that I doesn’t like the colors of the aircraft but couldn’t decide what to do with them. The boat is more accurat as I did find a drawing from that event in color. Research is always good to find the original colors but sometimes there is no information at all.
Skin is always a problem, even grass is difficult. Clothing is pure fantasy most of the time.

Anyway.. thank you for your feedback, always welcome!

Very interesting to see these photos, and the colouration process does bring a bit more life to them.

…but sometime I think the colours are too vivid for my tastes.

The Schneider Trophy photo is maybe a good example of this. The blue and yellow of the aircraft jumps right out the page, but still look a bit flat and two-dimensional. I’ve tried re-colouring black and white photographs, and it is hard work. Something I’ve noticed is that even colour photos aren’t necessarily that colourful. The sky isn’t often a pleasantly sky blue colour for instance. In the Schneider Trophy photo there are features on the boat in the background that appear to be coloured brown, almost because they had to have a colour of some sort. This isn’t necessarily the case.

In the case of the following photograph of the rock band ‘Hot Tuna’, I got as far as colourising the bassist Jack Casady before parking the project:

I gave up partly because the original black and white photo was fairly low resolution, and also because I couldn’t clearly see how the drums should look. I studied colour photographs of 1970s rock bands simply to try and get the colour balance right on the bassist. Even though he is clearly Caucasian, I didn’t tint his arms and face a sort of Percy Pig-shade of pink because a lot of old concert photographs have a much warmer hue to them.

I had better luck with the following image:

…colourising it:

In the case of this photograph I had better luck. Then again I still got unstuck! The speaker cabinets behind the bassist are a fairly dull silver/grey shade. I know this because I’ve seen Hiwatt amplifier cabinets in real life! In the black and white photo they look dull, so how do you bring them to life? I filled them in with a very subtle blue, but even then I’m still not happy with them. I never finished off the bottom third of this photo!

The other thing I struggled with was the bass guitar itself. I know that this bass guitar had a ‘sunburst’ finish (red through to yellow in a gradual transition), but you wouldn’t be able to see too much of this given the lighting in the photo.

Anyway, I hope you don’t see this as too much like flat-out criticism. I’m just a dabbler whereas you are doing this quite seriously! I hope you find my post to be of some use.

🙂 Well done ,brings it to life