Ink Colors used in T206

mrvster · #1 03-08-2012, 02:35 PM

Erick...

Your card is it!!!!

Uh ohhhhhhh....

someone might be getting bit by the freak bug.......

Blunder19 · #2 03-08-2012, 04:36 PM

I have a kruger that just has the yellow ink and then a layer of pink to create an orange background... you can tell its pink becuase the yellow sticks out on the left and the pink sticks out on the right where they were not alligned exactly.

so based on this card.. I would say Pink was a color used.

bn2cardz · #3 03-08-2012, 05:15 PM

On my "Sunburned" groom example you can see that there was some yellow mixed in with what seems to be two passes of pink (as better seen from the left side).

jimonym · #4 03-08-2012, 07:04 PM

Part of the reason the cards are so eye-appealing is that the artists were masters of teasing the appearance of many, many hues out of a relatively small number of base colors.

For Doc Crandall's portrait I see at least the following base colors, all working together to create a smooth skin tone with some sense of perspective and depth: buff, yellow, light brown, light blue, pink, red and dark brown (or black). The colors are virtually the same as shown in Chris's test strip.

mrvster · #5 03-08-2012, 08:06 PM

Great insight guys:d

sirraffles · #6 03-08-2012, 08:18 PM

@atx840 I like the way you picked up on the buff color. I had just finished reading a book on cigar labels and had noticed the same thing. The stippling of other colors really had the potential to bring the faces to life. A stippling artist had to spend five years as an apprentice, they were among the elites in the art department.

steve B · #7 03-09-2012, 09:10 AM

Being able to do stippling by hand is a special talent.

The dot pattern on nearly all printed matter wasn't done by hand. The halftone is made by photographing the original through a filter that's basically a screen the varying ammounts of light through each hole expose the film differently and produce the dot pattern.

One of the things that I like about 1910 era lithography is that they combine halftones which were fairly advanced for the time with more traditional art style layers that don't have a dot pattern. So the T206s are essentially a brown monotone image that's been colored.

That had been pretty much abandoned by the 80's, and likely much sooner.

Modern systems are also screened much finer, and there are systems that are direct from the computer to the plate which is created while it's on the press.

Steve B

sirraffles · #8 03-09-2012, 09:43 PM

Yes, on the T206 series you are correct about the dot pattern. Most of it was not done by hand stippling but through a halftone. I could be wrong but I've looked at a fair number of the T206 cards magnified and it seems that some of the portraits had the halftone enhanced with some hand stippling. The backgrounds often seem to have some stippling too, especially in the skies. Would you agree?

If there was hand stippling plus halftones...I don't think that there were very many things printed like that. It is like a snapshot in time.

Runscott · #9 03-09-2012, 09:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by steve B

Being able to do stippling by hand is a special talent.

The dot pattern on nearly all printed matter wasn't done by hand. The halftone is made by photographing the original through a filter that's basically a screen the varying ammounts of light through each hole expose the film differently and produce the dot pattern.

One of the things that I like about 1910 era lithography is that they combine halftones which were fairly advanced for the time with more traditional art style layers that don't have a dot pattern. So the T206s are essentially a brown monotone image that's been colored.

That had been pretty much abandoned by the 80's, and likely much sooner.

Modern systems are also screened much finer, and there are systems that are direct from the computer to the plate which is created while it's on the press.

Steve B

Steve, it's always intrigued me that some of the T206's look almost exactly like the photograph they were taken from (especially the Horners like Wagner, but also some non-portraits such as Donlin seated), while others look like they were drawn from scratch (Bresnahan batting). Others, such as Keeler batting, look like a combination of photography and art. Very interesting stuff - thanks for sharing your expertise!

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