So, about that “women in bath” thing. Not what you’re probably thinking. It was actually the unofficial, kinda tongue-in-cheek name we ended up calling this one crazy restoration gig I took on a while back. We’re talking about a set of really old, delicate artworks. And man, they were in a sorry state.
What I Walked Into
When I first got my hands on these pieces – they were mostly old prints, depicting some, let’s just say, classic historical scenes of bathhouses and the like – my jaw kinda dropped. Not in a good way. They were trashed. Water stains everywhere, weird yellowing, some had actual tears. The colors? Faded into almost nothing. Looked like they’d been stored in a leaky shed for a good fifty years.
My initial reaction? “No way I’m touching this.” But you know how it is, I’m a sucker for a challenge. So, I decided to dive in.
The Nitty-Gritty Work
First up, I had to super carefully try and get the surface dirt off. I mean, I was using brushes softer than a baby’s hair. Took forever. Each piece was its own little horror show. Some were so brittle, I was scared they’d turn to dust if I sneezed too hard.
Then came the fixing of the tears. That was a real headache. I had this special archival repair tissue, super thin stuff. But trying to line up the broken paper fibers? That nearly broke me. I swear, I spent hours, squinting through a magnifier, just to get one edge to meet properly.
- Dusting and cleaning – real slow going.
- Mending the paper – an absolute beast of a task.
- Trying to lift stains – some of those suckers were permanent!
The color correction part was a whole other battle. Since these were old prints, figuring out the original hues was like playing detective with no clues. I’d find a tiny, less-faded speck of color under a frame edge and try to extrapolate. I messed around with some digital tools, nothing too fancy, just pixel by pixel, trying to bring back some life without making it look like a cartoon. It was a fine line, let me tell you.
There were definitely days I wanted to just throw in the towel. Seriously considered it more than once. But then, I’d get one little section looking halfway decent, see a flicker of what it used to be, and that’d give me the push to keep slogging away.
Seeing the Light
This wasn’t a weekend job, not by a long shot. We’re talking weeks, stretching into months, of just painstakingly working on them bit by bit. But slowly, ever so slowly, they started to look like something again. Those murky, sad-looking scenes began to show their original details. The actual art, which was buried under layers of neglect, started to peek through.
Were they gallery-perfect in the end? Nah, of course not. You can’t magically undo that kind of damage completely. But they were worlds better. You could actually look at them and see what the artist intended. And that feeling, of rescuing something that was almost lost? That’s pretty good stuff.
So yeah, that whole “women in bath” project. Ended up being less about the specific subject and more about the pure stubborn effort of trying to fix something broken. Taught me a ton about just sticking with it. And it’s true what they say, the hardest jobs are often the ones you look back on and think, “Wow, I actually did that.” What a trip.
