Last week Hera & I went to see Amococo, a luminarium by UK’s Architects of Air on here during the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Was really beautiful walking barefoot through the inflated labyrinth of colourful tunnels, we caught it at the best time of day when the sun was overhead. Hera thought she’d gone to heaven and didn’t want to leave the “tent,” despite the fact it was around 30 degrees that day and very hot inside the tunnels! We cooled off by putting our faces in the air conditioning fans throughout, and enjoyed getting lost doing several laps of the structure.

Am about halfway through digitally colouring my pencil illustrations for Spotty & Eddie’s latest adventure by Lisa M. Chalifoux… wanted to share a couple before and afters of my illustrations (clicking on them will bring up a larger image). The colouring has been going very quickly thanks to my new Wacom tablet… I bought my first one this summer and taught myself how to use it, so this is the first big project I’ve used it on. And I LOVE it. Also, here is a snapshot of how the layout is turning out in the InDesign file… I find it helps dropping in the colour illustrations into the layout as I go so that I can make sure the colours balance nicely.

I’ve done this tutorial before, but wanted to show in a little more detail how easy it is to tint with colour a graphite pencil drawing in Photoshop. This example is from the children’s book I’m currently working on, Spotty & Eddie Visit Percé. (First off though I’ll apologize for my fluctuating spelling of the word “Colour.” Being Canadian that’s how we spell it… but Photoshop uses American spelling, but I just can’t help my English grammar sometimes!)

1) Scan the pencil drawing at 300dpi 100%. Then open in Photoshop, and resave as a PSD file.

2) In this sketch I want a pure white background. Instead of erasing the background, I used the magic wand to select the background, feathered the edges, and then on a new layer filled the selection with white. This leaves me the option to later change the white to a coloured background. (Read on …)

I’ve been itching to do a study of this little Bébé dress by Minihaha… here’s the finished piece as part of my illustrated diary of Hera’s stuff. I used acrylic on a piece of old Pantone 178 paper by Letroset… below are a few scans I took in between the layers of painting.

First, I lightly penciled in the outline of the dress onto the pantone paper… I left the pantone details along the edge attached as thought it would be nice to remember how old the paper is.

Next, as it was such a busy pattern I painted the corderoy fabric without its pattern to establish the texture & shading.

Then, I spent quite a bit of time studying the pattern… it was so complex I left out a lot of interesting shapes & colour combinations, and tried to capture the gist of the pattern

Lastly, I added a little more texture on top of the painted pattern to knock it back a bit, and added a few white highlights to the trim.

Thought I’d share a palette I created using myPANTONE, inspired by one of my children’s books, “Spotty & Eddie Learn to Compromise” by Lisa Chalifoux.

Here’s a palette I created using myPANTONE, inspired by one of my children’s books, “The Little Boy’s Smile” by Tom Krause.

I’ve been testing out the myPANTONE online account coupled with their colour picker software, as I wanted to start saving palettes from my illustrations for future use.

The myPANTONE online account is kind of fun, in the sense that you’re part of a colour loving community with a lot of colour inspiration available to you. The best part is sharing & collecting colour palettes… I’ve created an account and am sharing palettes from my children’s book illustrations.

When you click on any individual palette, you can see the palette in more detail… rolling over the swatches brings up their Pantone and RGB values. You can also upload an image that inspired the palette, as well as tag your palettes with keywords that describe it, so it’s easier for others to find. The futuristic sound effects every time you load the page is kind of irritating though.

The myPANTONE colour picker software is pretty easy to use… you can either create palettes from a colour wheel, or select an image and choose from it 12 swatches of colours to create your palette. The tabbed navigation is not user-friendly, as there is no text, just an obscure square patch of colour… you have to wait for the mouse-over text to pop up to see what the tab is for.

My main beef with it is that you can’t select more than 12 swatches of colour… and I use about 20+ colours to colour an entire children’s book digitally, so it isn’t quite the best all around colour picker for me. For my personal use, I may have to stick to creating my swatches in Photoshop and saving the palettes after each project… and just use the myPANTONE account & software for sharing & finding inspiration for colour.