Storybook project – colouring

After Yin Lam finished drawing the story, Melissa traced the sketches in Illustrator, and exported them as high-quality JPEG (300 ppi). I then coloured the JPEG images in Photoshop, as I felt that the soft brush gave me more flexibility to shade and produce more realistic illustrations.

I soon realized that colouring in Photoshop was more time-consuming than I’d expected. I had to keep changing the brush sizes to colour the finer details of the drawings. Also, I had to erase strokes that I coloured outside of the outlines, so I had to change eraser sizes too. (Maybe I didn’t find a better way to do this.) In the end, Melissa had to help me colour almost 10 pages to speed up the process.

Characters

I started colouring the characters first. I used conventional colours for the penguins, except light yellow for their fronts, to make them more colourful. I also used analogous colours to colour parts of the penguins to make them look more realistic, e.g. orange and yellow for the beaks. I also used the dodge/burn tool to shade the penguins.

Character Accessories

Initially, I used feminine shades of pink and purple for both Mama and Grandma. However, my group mates suggested using green for Grandma, so as to better differentiate between the two. I changed accordingly.

Different shades of pink and green were used to colour Mama’s skirt and Grandma’s apron respectively, so as to add texture and interest to the illustrations.

Background

Although colouring was tedious, the most difficult part was deciding on a suitable background colour. This is because I did not want to leave the background white, as I thought it will make the storybook look boring and plain. I also did not want to use too much blue background (e.g. page 9, below) to fit in with the icy cold setting of Antarctica, as too much blue will make the book look boring as well.

Thus I chose light yet bright colours for the backgrounds of the interior of the igloos (e.g. page 21, below), so that the book will appeal more to children.

Although colouring was tedious, (I stayed up to around 2 a.m. for about 3 to 5 days doing nothing else but colouring) I think the experience gave me a good idea on how work is like if I were to work in graphic design, or probably any other design-related fields. (Working is probably worse?) Hmm, I shall ponder if this is a job for me after the exams ;)