I colorized a plate from a 1570 fencing treatise by hand in Photoshop for UV printing. No AI. The original hatching shows through every garment.
The finished plate, with all color under the line work so the original hatching still does the shading.
Christian Darce told me up front what he didn't want.
An AI model would smooth the hatching into gradients, shift the palette toward something modern and invent detail where the original was unclear. On a print sold as a historical object, invented detail is a defect.
The source is a plate from Joachim Meyer's 1570 fencing treatise, a major surviving manual of the German longsword tradition. It's public domain, and the hand-colored impressions have faded unevenly over 450 years.
I brought the plate back to the saturation it had when the color was fresh, without changing any choice the original colorist made. The blue swordsman stays blue and the tan doublet stays tan. I only restored density, separation and color that had gone chalky.
Every color layer sits under the original line work, set to Multiply. The scan's line work stays on its own layer at the top, so no color can cover the woodcut.
Then I masked garment by garment. Each doublet, sleeve, column and floor tile got its own mask, because neighboring colors had drifted together. A global hue shift would have moved the paper tone too.
I kept the aged paper. Bleaching it white would make a 450-year-old print look like a modern reproduction.
On AI: I use AI for research and writing, never for artwork. I didn't use it here for colorization, upscaling or filling detail. Everything in this file is the original scan plus hand-placed color.
The file was printed UV on a physical product. UV inks lay down dense and gain on the substrate, so reds and blacks that look right on a monitor close up and lose their hatching.
I pulled back density in the darkest garments so the print would land where the screen version was. I kept the paper tone warm because UV white is brighter than expected and makes everything else look cooler.
The spectators at the table, the drummer on the stair, the dog under the blades and the lettering showing through from the back of the leaf are all the 1570 impression. Only the color is new, and only where color had been before.
The client reviewed each proof and approved the final for production. He knew his print specs, so the UV discussion was short.
Where this leads: I want more historical and editorial illustration work, where accuracy to a source matters. I have a history degree as well as a design degree, which helps when the job is knowing what not to change.
I restore and colorize historical artwork by hand and prepare it for print.
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