Injecting Colour

As children’s books are filled with bright and bold colours in order to gain their attention, I felt that this element was what my current illustrations were lacking. However as my illustrations are primarily there to be ‘coloured in’, incorporating colour into my pages was difficult to overcome. After experimenting with colour and space, I decided to apply little pieces of bright colour to the pages, that bled onto both sides. So as the dot to dot illustration was on one side of the page and the colouring page was on the opposite side, I chose a primary colour that would be used upon both pages.

As a way of maintaining a blank space for the child to colour in, I chose to create a background for which the illustration will foreground upon the page;

As shown within this image above I have used a circular shape to surround the illustration, I also deliberated colour choice; the illustrations reflect the colours chosen. So for the eagle I chose blue to mirror the sky…

To mirror and bleed the element of colour onto the dot to dot page however I chose a different direction and instead created a sense of landscape and background that is highlighted and the bottom of the page. I achieved this by layering 3 slightly differing layers that are all shades of the original colour blue.

 

 

The light shades give the illustration a sense of depth, creating more of a foreground and background. It also blends and connects the corresponding pages together.