Traditional watercolor and repeating backgrounds

[demotlj]

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?

[mag]

@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.

[mag]

@demotlj I'd copy the sketch, though

[NessIllustration]

@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.

[demotlj]

@NessIllustration

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.

[StudioHannah]

From what I remember in books I read as a kid that had similar backgrounds on different pages, there were just inconsistencies. Nothing wrong with that!

If you want to go totally non-digital, you can paint the dog separately and cut him out, placing him where he needs to go and then scanning the piece a second time. Voila - dog!

[makekong]

@NessIllustration yeas, this is what Disney did and Miyazaki does as well

[NessIllustration]

@makekong Yeah it's an animation technique. Imagine drawing the background over and over again for every frame! My my... It's actually what they used to do very early on in the beginning of animation and the artists very quickly realized they needed a better solution. There's an old animation short from the early 1900s called Gertie the Dinosaur in which they redrew the background in every frame. That's a real labor of love!

[demotlj]

In animation they were able to layer the cells and place the background under the foreground just like we do digitally now in all of our drawings but pre-digital children's book illustrators wouldn't have been able to do that working on watercolor paper so I'm curious how they solved that problem. Keeping the line consistent wouldn't be an issue because they could use tracing paper or light boards but the paint -- colors, textures, etc. -- would be harder to match I would think. They may have simply been better than I am! (Actually, I know they were better than I am so maybe that's all there is to the secret.)

I'm going to have to look through a bunch of older children's books, see if I can find any that repeat scenes between pages, and look at them more closely.

[NessIllustration]

@demotlj The thing is I'm not sure that exact consistency was that much of a concern. It would be rare to reuse the exact same background in 2 pages, and even then, it doesn't really matter if there are little differences (not like it matters in animation). I'm not sure if this was ever an issue that picture book illustrators of old had to even figure out...