Traditional watercolor and repeating backgrounds
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I’m working on a children’s book as a personal project and have decided to do it in traditional watercolor because I prefer working in that medium to digital. The book is about a mini golden doodle who is so small you can’t see him until he jumps so I am going to have a lot of pages with duplicate scenes — one where the dog is hidden and the next where the dog reveals himself by jumping. The backgrounds, then, will be the same while the characters will change positions.
I’m wondering how best to approach this for consistency between the two pages. If I were doing this digitally, I’d just copy and paste background layers. With watercolor, though, while I can get the line work consistent, I don’t think I’ll be able to get the color, shading, and texture exactly the same for each page because of the nature of watercolor unless I use very basic washes.
Obviously, the easy answer is to do it digitally and give up on the watercolor but before the digital age, artists must have faced this question so I’m curious as to how they managed. Does anyone have experience with this? Suggestions? Thoughts?
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@demotlj I think the pages might actually benefit from not having the background completely the same (copy/paste style), so if there are going to be small inconsistencies, it might be charming.
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@demotlj I'd copy the sketch, though
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@demotlj Agreed that it might look more interesting if it's not a copy paste. But it would save time to reuse for sure. You could paint the background separately from the character, then collage it on the the computer.
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I thought about that. I think what I will try is first I will work on the two pages side by side — doing both backgrounds at the same time so I don’t have to remix paints to try to match an already finished painting — and then I will scan them before I add the characters. If the two pages don’t seem consistent enough, I’ll work on adjusting them digitally.
Out of curiosity, I think I will also look at some pre-computer children’s books to see if I can find any where they had to keep a consistent background over several pages and how they did that.