Book & Website Illustration Colorization

The brief was fairly straightforward. Take an existing drawing of a map, colorize it and add more map labels. The challenges were firstly, that the map was already colored, and secondly the elements of the drawing would have to be moved to make space for the additional labels.

The first job was to find a way of reliably extracting the ink drawing from the colored background. Then I had to separate the various elements so that I could work on them, and have full control of the coloring process as I was expecting to go through several revisions with the customer.

Saturday, and the image I have been asked to work on:

Later: All the different elements have been extracted. island, sea, inset images, compass and border. Fortunately all the smaller labels were already available as separate Photoshop Layers, so I’ve not needed to do anything with them (so far). The font is going to change to improve readability, so I may have to re-size them.

End of the day Saturday: using some printed samples I’d been given, I matched the colors, and started adding color detail.

Sunday: now all the color detail has been added. The color of the lakes needs to change. The ground’s color has been shifted towards yellow and de-saturated.

I have a Web conference with the customer Monday, the screen sharing technology will enable him to see different color options as I change them. This will enable us to finalize the colors and speed up the process too. Then I can work on the inset images, border, and finally add the label text.

Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved. For Davis-Allman LLC