Illustrating a Picture Book: Touching up the Bears (!)

I've spent the whole weekend glued to the computer, turning the scans of my Bears on the Stairs illustrations into print-ready images. They came back from Switzerland as a DVD last week.

Here's a taster, to give you an idea of the sort of thing I've been up to...

This is how the front cover is going to look:

But this is the digital scan off the DVD, of my original illustration:


My job was to knock out the pink paper background and replace it with the green (chosen by the Designer at Anderson Press) being careful to keep the soft pastel edge to the drawings. You might also have noticed, I've touched up a bit of smudging in the stairs too.

I didn't add the text by the way: that was sent to me by the Designer, to help me judge how it would look printed.

No time for further detail, as I'm off to schools again first thing in the morning (6.45am cab!) and have to pack my stuff, but will tell more later.