If you’ve ever talked shop with me, you know that it’s not hard to get me to wax poetic about alternative and historical processes. Through that lengthy praise of hands-on photographic processes, I’ve no doubt mentioned my bucket list of processes I hope to learn one day. Bromoil, for several years now, has topped that list.

I’ve taken some time over the past few months to start dabbling in it and finally have some encouraging results. They are far from stellar or perfect, but they show enough promise to keep me digging.

Blending traditional darkroom process with a hands-on, alternative process, this process incorporates painterly, impressionistic elements into traditional silver prints. It encourages reinterpretation of imagery and embraces imperfection and serendipitous elements as you continue to build layers of lithographic ink to bleached silver prints, choosing to stop once you’re pleased with the results. Since learning the Chemigram process years back and creating an entire series of work from it, I’ve learned how much I appreciate serendipity while leaving my hand tangibly visible in the final product. From brush strokes and imperfections to unique elements and fingerprints, embracing imperfection has made me a happier artist.

My Bromoil technique is crude at best and there’s more than enough room for improvement, but now that I see what these prints can be, I’m eager to continue to work on them.  There are areas of uneven tone, some spotty areas that lack ink and nearly no detail in my brightest highlights. Unlike the instructions I’m following, I find that my second stippling step to move ink from the highlights to the shadows doesn’t work well unless it is followed by a brush wiping of the highlights. As well, I don’t know if the texture of the print is as it should be, but I do find its current look encouraging. I look forward to creating more results in coming months while also consulting the vast online community of alt-pro artists to guide me to refine my methods.

As always, comments, critique, suggestions and redirection is warmly welcomed.