I love the one with the bunny. 

Hint Hint...     I know some amazing watercolor artist that I will not mention their name to upset their fans but some of the best watercolor paintings now a days are actually done with......  (GOUACHE!!!) 

Winsor & Newton designers gouache has the best smoothness to it, no bull.
I worked with it for some time and it's the smoothest paint to lay down and there's more colors you might not find with plain old watercolor paint.

I am not going in to details about the paint, but if you're doing water color I suggest you try it for yourself.

 

If you have a steamer or even a wet sponge, let water soak in to the wood, lay it on a floor in a flat surface, put weight on it (paint cans perhaps) and let it dry with the weight on. After it dries it should be back in shape.

Another thing you can do is to buy new canvas stretchers. Make sure it is of a more sturdy, better quality wood and replace the canvas onto the new stretchers. Pick out the staples from the old canvas, when you are installing it to the new stretchers make sure you stretch it out a little more than originally. I don't recommend it this way, but if the first option doesn't work, it's something that's doable.

In my opinion I'd leave it alone because there is no clue what texture or drapery the dress had. It might make it look phony no matter how professional you get it done. But then again, you're digitally restoring them, so there is no hurt in trying, you still have the original untouched.
The only option I can think of is to color tone the dress and veil, there's only so much you can do to repair an old photograph. If you can paint it digitally photo-realistic it may be able to work. Make sure you keep the original photographs in an acid free environment unexposed to light to prevent yellowing and further damage.

Good luck.

Practice is leet ! First of all in my opinion I'd say get a good fundamentals book to help understand what your dealing with, start off with still life images in black and white to help you understand gradients in lights and darks, get a good pencil set! from around 7H to around B6
and get some blending stumps to.

Use grid lines for starters to layout your drawing , sketch like crazy (remember) sketches are not your final masterpiece they're just for exercise and to help you understand what your doing, and or just for fun.   
When you are drawing think of the shapes and angles you are looking for, squint your eyes now and then to blur things out it makes things pretty handy.

Start out with less complex images and things and as you progress you will scale things up, step back now and then so you can see your full image then you can say "hey.. that looks a bit off" then you can fix it.
don't go for shading right away, work your layout first then throw in a few simple shadows to indicate the dark spots where it's most needed.

One of my favorite books for overall drawing is : Giovanni Civardi's complete guide to drawing.

Drawing is like learning how to play an instrument, you can't just pick it up and do a master guitar solo, you need to practice your ABCs and work your way up, it might be hard at the start but as you progress you will love what you can create as you get better and better. 

Tip:Tryout different mediums too! Pen and ink, markers, paint, pastels.
Start with using only one color and it will help exercise your sense of lights and darks.

hi there I'm new to craftster  i know this thread is out of date from 2006 but ooh well,
i know photoshop  well and i know a lot of stuff about it . my wife got me to join craftster and the first thing i looked up was digital painting and photoshop and pow here i am. =D    

i will have more details about myself soon and hopefully to help some peeps with questions about artsy fartsy stuff.

but for now i always paint my own avatars in photoshop.

once i get all my info up ill hop back to this thread and post a few pieces of my old  photoshop stuff.

any questions? PM me   <('.'<)  (>'.')>