Monday 16 September 2013

Illustration: Tracing-Up, Ready for the Artwork


I have started my pastel artwork for The Jungle Grumble. I am only doing 2 pieces of artwork at this stage, to be taken to the Frankfurt Book Fair by my publisher. I have just enough time to get it done. Because things are tight, John has been helping me with jobs, like cutting my pastel paper to size: 


I generally work larger than the actual size. On this book I am doing my drawings at 120%, although one of the 2 images the publisher has chosen for their Frankfurt presentation is the very complex 8th spread, so I'l be doing that at 140%, so I can manage the detail:  


Another job is getting the prints-outs of the roughs ready for me to trace. We only have an A4 printer. By the time the line-work is enlarged to the scale I am going to work at, the image is pretty big, so we have to print it out in several bits and then stick them back together again. The image above was in 6 pieces! To get them to line up accurately, we use the light-box:


I then have the extremely tedious job of tracing the illustrations up onto my pastel paper, again on the lightbox. I have to turn out the lights and pull the blinds, to make it dark enough to see through the pink pastel paper, which is about as thick as watercolour paper. If you want to know why I use pink, read this post, from when I was at the same stage with Dragon's Dinner.

Next job: pastels!

6 comments:

Adrienne said...

I'm encouraged to know that I'm not the only one combining sections of images manually and tracing the enlarged image on a lightbox. Thank you for sharing your process.

Studio Kaufmann said...

What a fascinating insight into the publishing process. I had no idea it was so fiddly and time consuming! I love your animal art it is so funny and cute.

Unknown said...

Good to see your hard at work. I'm excited to see the end result. Stay active, best wishes,
Benjamin

theartofpuro said...

It's great to see the publishing process:) What a great idea the pink paper,great post:)

Lynne the Pencil said...

Thank you. Glad to hear that the background information is still interesting.
:-)

Candy Gourlay said...

That there's craft, that is!