Children's Book Illustration: Digitally Created Backgrounds

On Monday morning, despite the sunshine in the garden, I knuckled down and started the digital stage of Baby Goes Baaaaa!. Come Tuesday, I had to break off for my assessing work at the University, but today I have been hard at it again.

Each of my pastel illustrations for the book was created on my usual, pink paper but, as you can see from the mock-up above, created by Sarah, my designer at Egmont, the images are designed to sit on bright background colours, so the pink area around each drawing needs removing. 

I won't go into the boring details (yawn...) of how this is actually done in Photoshop (I can already hear your sighs of relief), but since I always have to do this bit, I thought I'd quickly explain the principle again, using the koalas as an example.

I get back a scan of each illustration that looks like the one above. In good old Photoshop, I then quickly knock out the pink, to get this instead:

This might look done, but the final image is going to sit on the pale yellow, so I create a temporary yellow layer beneath my koalas, so I can guage exactly what it's going to look like.

The first, obvious thing to adjust is the shadow.

The lilac shadow above looked right on the pink background I began with, but is way too strong on yellow, so this looks much more natural:

I will go back and soften the dark line beneath his feet I think, but otherwise that's now fine.

I next need to fine-tune the edges. This is more of a problem on some illustrations than others. The koalas are not too bad, as their grey fur colour is fairly different to the pink I cut away, so it's worked pretty well. It can still be touched up slightly though. Look at a section near the bottom:

It's subtle, and I'm careful to keep the irregular pastel edge intact, but you can see the one above is just a little ragged compared to my fine-tuned version below:

If you look at the back of the skirt and the area between the legs, you can see I've also taken the opportunity to get rid of the occasional bit of pencil line, left over from tracing up.

This is how the finished piece looks:

Once they are all done, I will look at all the illustrations together and decide whether I think Sarah's colour choices need any adjustments, or whether I am happy to go ahead.