One thing that is always suggested to me by tutors at work in progress meetings and tutorials is to try mis-aligning my colour a bit more, in the way that would occur in a screen print.
This isn't something I'm particularly keen on as I don't think it will suit this project, but I thought it best to give it a go anyway, so I tried out a new technique for colouring in my illustrations. I would say this process is almost like a digital version of a screen-print, creating negatives for each colour and layering them all together at the end:
First up I drew my illustration in my sketchbook as I usually would, this time it was a character design for Rapnuzel.
I scanned in the drawing and edited it digitally, tidying up a few mistakes such as the hand and the face before printing it out onto A4 paper.
Using tracing paper and black ink I then created "negatives" for each of the separate colours in the illustration, e.g. one for the hair, one for the wall etc.
The tracing paper crinkles up quite a lot when its painted on so that helped to create a bit of texture and prevent the layers from being perfectly aligned.
Next up I scanned in all of these layers and used the magic wand on photoshop to pick out just the black shapes and get rid of any of the creases in the background of the tracing paper. I have a selection of colour palettes saved to my computer so I picked out one of those and decide on which colour to use for each layer. I coloured the layers in by adding a new layer in photoshop, filling it with the colour and setting the blend mode to screen. I chose to do it that way rather than just filling it in as that helped to keep the paint-like texture that the tracing paper had helped create.
Finally I brought all the layers together, with the lightest colour at the bottom and the line drawing at the top, and set the blend modes to multiply. It took a little bit of adjusting and resizing some of the layers, but the above image is the final result.
For an illustration of this size and level of detail, I think this works quite well. However, my final outcomes are going to have a lot more detail in them (with at least 10 characters per double-page spread, as well as scenery and other elements) and for that I think this technique will start to look too messy. For example, the flowers in the top left of this image are quite detailed and I think they look too untidy, as there are too many layers over-lapping each other in a small space (in fact there was meant to be another layer for the leaves but I left that one out as it looked to messy).
However, I do like the slight texture that this method produces, which can seen a bit clearer in the wall in this version (it is clearer when printed out):
I will be discussing this technique at my tutorial with Jonny on thursday, but at the moment I don't think I will be using the mis-aligned colour in my final illustrations, however I am likely to create some more paint/ink textures to use so that the images aren't too flat.