Choosing the Background Colours

While my trusty new side-kick gets my admin up to date, I am still working away at the computer, cutting out the illustrations for my new book Baby Goes Baaaaa!, lifting the pastel drawings from the digital scans, ready for the coloured backgrounds to be dropped behind. 

But I quickly realised that making final decisions on the exact colours of the backgrounds needed to take priority, as changing them later would mean revisiting the cutouts. 

Sarah at Egmont suggested a colour scheme of around 7 colours, repeated throughout, to hold things together - a good idea. I tweaked her colour suggestions a bit and then narrowed them down to 6 I felt worked well across all the images.

Above are the 1st 4 spreads of the book, with all 6 colours in play.

I substituted the brighter blue above for the more lilac-blue Sarah originally suggested, and I wasn't keen on the peachy yellow below.

Sarah had kicked things off by created a low-res, digital mock-up of the whole book, a tricky task, like putting together a jigsaw. I agreed that most of it worked well, but made a few suggestions for changes. 

Having decided against the rhino's background yellow, I tried out all the other colours and ironically the best seemed to be the pale blue that was already in use for the adjacent snake. So I then had to try other snake backgrounds (whilst making sure I didn't use the colours on the previous spread either, or I'd get a knock on effect that would roll out of control!).

This was the best combination I could get (in the end almost a direct reversal of Sarah's 1st idea):

I felt the pinky lilac worked better for the ducks than Sarah's original blue (or my brighter substitution):

Which had a knock-on effect on the bunny / slug image, because of the flow of colours through the book. Instead of the pinky background Sarah had given it...

...I introduced the bright blue:

...which Sarah rightly pointed out was a bit overpowering. She suggested the green instead, which works much better:

Which meant that we needed the stronger blue towards the end, so she suggested changing the quack / roar spread yet again, to this (I'll tweak the tiger's orangy 'roar' lines to fit the blue better):

I think when things are working well, designing a picture book should be a collaborative process like this, with both illustrator and designer happy to bat ideas back and forth.

Sarah and I have worked together on several books across 3 different publishers over the years, so we are very in tune by now, which really helps (thanks Sarah!).