The Blue Girl in the Yellow Hat

Strikingly tinted blue-toned postcards.  This series appears to have been quite popular-- I have seen more examples from it than any other!

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This one, interestingly, has a different publisher's mark than the other two-- Bleuet instead of A Noyer. 

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History: Early Colours

As we've seen, the hand-tinted postcards of the 1900s and 1910s were mostly muted colours, a stark contrast from the near-neons that characterize the 1920s cards. However, they were not the only coloured postcards around. In the same time period, postcard creators were also experimenting with bright, vibrant dyes and dye-combinations. These were almost always done on cards depicting women or couples--a definite predecessor to the extreme colours of 1920s dye-toned postcards. Some varieties, in fact, use dye in creative ways that were never quite repeated. 

This post is made possible by a dear friend of mine, who also collects vintage postcards. All but one of these postcards come from her collection, and are reproduced with many thanks.

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1914, sent from Hungary.

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1913.

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Amour en Rose

Happy Valentine's Day! A few very lovely, very romantic postcards for the day. Straight dye-toned pink postcards can (usually) be overwhelming, but when the pink dye-toning is done to metallic cards, as in these examples, I feel it adds such an air of romance, especially when added to poses like these. 

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(This one, of course, you will recognize from the banner)

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Crazy Colour Photoshoot

Continuing along with some of the postcards so colourful as to be blinding...

I love this set for combining the look of having been coloured with highlighters with the look of detailed stenciling on the woman's dress, and I love the way the lack of tinting on the woman's face, legs, and hands and the entirety of the man gives them a surreal sense of unreality, like they are bright pink ghosts. I love the really long stems on the flowers that stick out oddly in almost every picture. I love how they are all sent from the same man to his fiancee on the 20th, 21st, and 24th of July (1929), and I love how he always notes the time he wrote (this is not uncommon in the period, but I always love it). I love how all the messages cut off mid-sentence-- he must have continued on in a longer letter or on other cards. I just love this set. 

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On this one, I also love how the tinting of the dress extends past the actual hemline of her dress!

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Crazy Colour

Exceptionally bright colours are one of the main characteristics of these cards (with occasional exceptions), but some of them go above and beyond, to the point of nearly blinding you with a variety of garish hues (I say that fondly, of course!). The most extreme are usually toned in bright pink or purple, with extensive tinting, The effect is even more pronounced when the photographs are taken outdoors, with the colours turning the scene into a surreal dreamscape. They're almost overwhelmingly kitschy-- and just terrific. 

Colour and Gold

Last month, I shared a lovely sub-genre of postcard where a tinted image was bordered with thick black, embellished with gold decoration. 

Though less common, these were sometimes done with a dye-toned image, again with a wide border and gold decoration: 

Black and Gold

A trend from the early 1930s-- the image is printed vignetted in a black background. The image is tinted and the black background is embellished with gold designs. Aren't they great? Sometimes a similar thing was done with dye-toned cards--but that is a story for another day! 

These were made by a few of the different publishing houses, although all the ones I own happen to be from PC Paris. 

You will notice these have a look of silver tarnish around the edges-- this is what is known as silver mirroring or silvering out, a process of deterioration that occurs in silver gelatin (ie, regular black-and-white) prints. It is most marked in dark areas, and since these have a lot of dark areas, well! I think it actually looks rather pretty in this case, but it is worth noting that it is not the original appearance-- the black would have been purely matte black. 

(The identification number of this postcard, in the bottom right, is exactly consecutive to the one above. So far this is the only instance I have of two exactly consecutive cards, though I have a couple that are very close.)

Postcards in Pink

Pink was quite a popular colour for dye-toned postcards-- and wow, are they pink!  As discussed in the post on dye-toning, the final image is made entirely out of dye, resulting in an image with pink darks and pink lights, until your eyes hurt from looking at it. 

The Double-Toned Postcard

Well I am back! I apologize very much for the disappearance of this blog, especially so early on. I realized I'd committed myself to more than I could manage, and unfortunately, this slipped. But I absolutely adore these postcards and I want to share them, and I'm going to dive back in! However, I'm going to go forward a bit differently, with less-detailed posts but maybe more postcards in each. Let's give it a try, anyway! 

First, though, I'll finish the survey of visual types. I'm actually not entirely sure how to classify these-- I'm not sure exactly how they're created, although it might be something to due with this double-toning process detailed by Kodak for film treatment. Somehow, though, they get this amazing blue-and-purple look--I've not yet seen it done with other colours, but maybe it's out there. 

Both these postcards are from the early 1930s (32 and 33), as are the others of this type I have (stay tuned!). It's too small a sample size to know for sure but it's possible it was a later innovation.