Artist Colorizes 40 Old Photos, And It Might Change The Way You Perceive History

And it's all because of the Internet. "I was browsing Reddit one day and came across some old colorized photographs," Madsen told Bored Panda. "They were colorized by hand. This discovery led me to a more in-depth search, and I learned that it was actually done by an old lady. She had a website dedicated to hand-coloring photographs of all periods with oil. It just absolutely blew me away.

Mads had spent the next couple of days cataloging everything she had done into periods, personalities, eras, etc, and when he was done, he decided 'Hey, I can do this myself!'

The colorist has a very concrete way of choosing images for his projects. "I mostly pick [a photograph] after I decide whether or not the subject's eyes will look good," he said. "I've always had a fascination with beautiful eyes, and that's how I pick most of my photographs. If you look through my gallery, you'll see that most of the eyes there are steely-blue or sky-blue, and they (hopefully) are framed beautifully by the surrounding color, contrasting with it really nicely. So that's the main criteria. That, and the overall quality [of the image]."

But colorizing a photo is a long and hard work. Madsen said the most difficult part is those that overlap with other objects, like tree branches that stretch into the sky. "If I don't want the sky to look brown or the branches to look blue, I have to [work them by hand, individually.]"

If photo colorization is something you'd like to try out yourself, Mads has a cool video tutorial on YouTube that's perfect for getting started.