Wood Painting Restoration
The painting on a wooden chest inside Yangxin Hall suffered centuries of exposure to air and moisture. The colors and outlines of the original painting have become almost completely invisible. By applying image enhancement and processing techniques and relying on my understanding of the traditional Chinese paintings from that period, I was able to restore over 95% of the objects and outlines of the painting, enabling its full restoration in the future.
RESTORATION
Angel Duan
7/29/2023
I was given the honor to restore a painting on a wooden cabinet door. However, I can hardly tell if there's still a painting the first time I saw it.
Current condition of the painting
Typically, the restoration of a piece like this would be done by some very experienced specialist and would take a long time. It would take years of training for someone to become good at it. Feeling desperate, I resorted to something I think may help me: my computer and some image processing tools, including Photoshop and Procreate.
After digitizing the painting, I start playing with the image. Little by little, the painting starts revealing itself. After a few nerve-racking days, I was very happy to see this. But there is something odd and I didn’t not know what it was. It took me a few days before I eventually figured out where the problem was. One of the planks was installed upside down.
Final outcomes
With some additional touch up, the finished image looks like below. There are still missing pieces, but small enough that good painters can probably fill them in with their imagination. I cannot wait to see the finished piece once the painting is done.
This experience is extremely rewarding because I completed something I thought was impossible at the beginning. The whole project took me over a week to finish and it was a lot of trial and error. I would like to explore the possibility of using artificial intelligence to help make this type of work easier and quicker.
