Narrative Illustration/ Development. Digital clean up

Although all my drawings are complete they are still not ready to be used in a final book. This is where digital clean up comes into play, allowing me to prepare my images for printing. This began by scanning all the finals  using a good quality scanner. All the illustrations are scanned at 300dpi as this is the requirements from the Project Brief. 

The Illustrations will be completed in Photoshop. Firstly I create a new document for each of my finals and open them for cleaning work. I have chosen to use Illustration seven to use as an example as it needs a few tweaks. After removing any unwanted areas from scanning I was ready to begin.

The first step is something I will use for all my final designs, this proses cleans the white background. When scanning, white areas on an image tends to get coloured or stained. Cleaning is especially good for Vignette style illustrations or purely black and white drawings. To do this I go to the “select” menu on the top tool bar in Photoshop. On the drop list there is a selection called “colour range…” and when selected will open an edit window. When this window is open the mouse cursor will function as the eye dropper tool, allowing you to pick a colour. The colour that is chosen with the eye dropper will be selected across the whole canvas. The fuzziness slider gives a bit of leeway to the selection. I used this tool to remove all the white from the image. Using the “erase” tool I remove any blemishes which were not removed by using “colour range”. 

After cleaning the background I wanted to move the peach closer into the image. To do this I select it using the “lasso tool”. The peach is simply selected and then moved closer into the design, then de-selected by pressing “control D”. 

Another useful thing I can do in Photoshop is to adjust the colours of each piece. To do this I go in to “Image” on the top tool bar and then “Levels…”. The level sliders allow me to change the colour strength of the image. I find this really helps with watercolour paintings as it gives them a bit of extra colour and helps the painting tie together. 

Once I am happy with the image I simply crop it and then save it as a JPEG file in CMYK. This image is a Vignette style Illustration so I just leave plenty of room around the edge of the image. This will leave space for a bleed line, that will come into place when I fit the images into the book layout. This was done for all the final pieces, below is the final result for illustration seven.

For the front cover I followed a similar process of cleaning, but with a few extra edits. After scanning in the cover drawings I then make a Photoshop document to fit the size of the cover with measurements 13cm by 20cm with a 1cm spine. Firstly I place the front cover into its appropriate space. I use the ruler tool in Photoshop to make sure that the banner is straight. I clean the cover drawing in the same way I cleaned up the Illustrations. When I’m sure it is lined up correctly I select round the banner and copy paste it. The new copy of the banner is placed on the back cover and lined up using the ruler lines.

To make the spine I take the small illustration of the flying Peach and measure it into place. I then clean it using “colour range”. This is followed up with the Title and “By Roald Dahl”. I place the text so it is read downwards as this is the most common choice for books.

For the back cover I simply placed the Seagull section above the banner and resized them slightly. After adjusting the colours and cleaning all the segments the cover was finally complete.

For a final touch I used the text box tool to add the blurb to my cover. I placed this in the spaces I had left when drawing out my design. The font doesn’t fit perfectly well with the design but this was just a test to see if it would fit in the spaces I had left. I found that the text fit fine in the gaps I left. I only needed to make the cover so I’m not too concerned about this.