Monday 19 December 2011

Dashing for the Finishing Line...


The rescans for Baby Can Bounce! came back last week (remember the problems we had?). The colours are definitely truer now, with more 'ping'. All good news, except having to do them again put us well behind schedule, especially with Christmas looming... 



It meant I had to strap myself to my computer, get my head down and digitally cut out these last few illustrations at record speed, so they could get to the printers before everyone waved their offices bye bye and got stuck into the mince pies and whiskey.




The trampoline cover piece above was straightforward (apart from swapping a green reflection on the trampoline for a purple one, now he's not naked!), but none of the 3 pieces we re-scanned from the inside have been especially quick or easy. The Baby can tickle monkeys at the top were unusually fiddly, with lots of edges. Baby can sniff / splash has been a headache because of the puddle splash: 




The main problem was trying to work out what colour it should be and how much of the background colour to allow through, to make it translucent and 'read' as water. 



I thought redoing the Baby can dig crocodile would been a particular pain, as cutting out the textured sand took an age the first time: it's so close in tone and colour to my pastel paper. Then I had to play around with my sand colour until it successfully blended into the hard yellow ground - it looks yellow on the pink, but is actually quite pink once you put it on yellow (if that makes sense!). 




In the end though, I managed to short-cut a lot of the work, by being sneaky and dropping the re-scanned animal characters on top of the sand background I'd already worked on from the original scan.




Phew. Sometimes I LOVE Photoshop! 

5 comments:

Kayleen West - Children Author/Illustrator said...

I smiled and thought "If only people knew how much went into a picture book!". It looks like it was worth the changes Lyn. I like the Crock on the yellow far better than the pink seeing it. I bet you will be glad when it is finalised though.

I hate the scanning process. The last lot I did picked up some oil paint off the paintings and I had lines to deal with. The trouble with Photoshop is that once you start playing you just want to keep adding a bit here, a bit there and a bit more everywhere :-)

June said...

Wow!
Doesn't the change of background colour make a huge difference to the character colours.
Clever of you to utilise the sand image you had already worked on.
It is all looking good, and now you can rest a little, and enjoy the holidays.
:o)

Clipping Path said...

Funny creation and awesome post .

Remove White Background said...

Hello guys ,
Your post amazes me .

Robert Smith said...

These are so lovely and creative. Very nice and beautiful