Friday 29 March 2013

Swap! - Choosing Colours



Part of the Photoshop work I have been doing recently on Swap!, has involved designing the colours for the book. Some pages have fully illustrated backgrounds, but the ones that don't - the ones I have been cutting out - need my pastel paper replacing with a bold, flat colour.

To give the book an overall feeling of unity, the designer and I have to decide upon a colour palette: a limited range of colours to which I then restrict myself:


The trick is to distribute these colour backgrounds reasonably evenly throughout the book, whilst still making sure that each illustration has the best colour behind it, a colour that shows it off to best effect, but that also compliments any illustration on the opposite side of the page.

Quite often in this book, I have used two different colours to suggest a room, without actually illustrating one, as with this spread of the ballet class:


I like the contrast the technique creates between the textured pastel work of the characters and the smooth, bold colour behind. 

6 comments:

Susan Syddall said...

Thank you, Lynne, for sharing about the process you go through when creating your stories. My boys and I are big fans of your work! I love the way you've created the sense of a room by using two colours without having to actually draw the room itself. A great idea, which I'm looking forward to trying out with my drawings one day. Anyway, I just wanted to say 'hi' and 'thanks' as I've been reading your posts for a while. I appreciate the time and effort it takes to update and maintain a blog. But more than that, I'm learning so much and for this I thank you!

Lynne the Pencil said...

That's so lovely Susan. Thank you. Say hello to your boys from me. Good luck with your own work :-)

theartofpuro said...

Thanks for sharing your work process.Very usefull,always something to learn from your posts:)

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