Children's Book

The main goal of children’s book is to gain a better understanding of color matching. The first step was to pick out a children’s book that only contained the mediums of watercolor and pen and ink. Next both of those mediums are used to recreate the page as close as possible. This means matching, hue, saturation, and brightness. As well as the style of ink (ex: line weight). The finished project should look as close to the original as possible in terms of color and style.

Cover of Waluk the Great Journey
A watercolor spread. The page is in a comic book style with polar bears.

Above is the final version of the watercolor spread. Each color was carefully matched, and each ink line practiced multiple times before the final

Practice

Before the final is selected, multiple spreads were painted first for practice, and to also select which spread has the most potential to paint.

First polar bear watercolor spread. This one includes swimming and lots of water
Watercolor spread 2. This one shows a young polar bear and a mentor
Watercolor spread 3. This shows an older polar bear. It is a recap of his life. One scene includes him fighting with another polar bear

The Process

Iron Oxide

Powder iron oxide in a small pile

Iron oxide is the first step in the process. This process traces the original ink lines as a guide.  It also allows you to just focus on color matching instead of trying to redraw the whole page just by eye.

Ink

A partially inked spread. With an ink can sitting next to it

Next is matching the ink style to the page. In some cases, the ink and watercolor stages were switched because the lines that needed to be inked would disappear in the watercolor. Although either way would work.

Watercolor

An in progress watercolor spread

Here is where watercolor comes in, it is important to practice mixing colors on a separate piece of paper first to make sure that the colors mixed match the original page as close as possible.

Raskog
Work