10% Rich Black and the Peppermint Glacier

Black Wolf of the Glacier, my most recent children's book project, is about an almost-black wolf. Colors eyedropped from a photo of Romeo revealed saturation levels ranging from 8 to 42%. While I didn't have an eydropping tool while I was mixing my wash colors, I tried to keep this in mind. On the cover, Romeo will be charcoal colored with 10% saturation.

Of course, part of me thinks: mythology doesn't give a rat's hindquarters about your point samples. An archetype is an archetype; he should have been licorice-flavored, a wolfish essence of a sumi-e ink drawing.

In the end, though, my reasoning became practical; several of the author's illustration descriptions called for more detail than a silhouette, which is what Romeo might have become had he been much darker. I had to create internal contrast somehow. I chose to use a little bit of brown color rather than including solid whites.

Romeo had to be a blend of colors for visibility's sake, but most of my color choices were not based on realism. I wanted Romeo's book to have a sharp, crisp wintery feel, like something between a candy cane and a stick of wintermint gum. For that reason, I limited the palette to a range of glacial blues and crimsons. I keep returning to this habit of color restriction that arises from the practical limits of screen printing.

As I discussed in earlier posts, I drew most of these illustrations with my Wacom tablet, then printed to watercolor paper, then painted, scanned, and edited again. My sample illustration (pages 4-5) carries a softer feel, perhaps because I spent less time on the drawing process for this piece than on any other. My drawing and painting stages for this page followed one another immediately, rather than occurring as separate processes. I think this actually resulted in a stronger piece, partly because when I draw first as a separate stage, I feel a responsibility to define everything with a kind of over-diligence, not trusting or leaving any shapes to the paint for fear that I would forget to include them. In future projects, I think I may let the drawing and painting compliment one another more naturally.

Another process division technique I devised proved more successful; I mixed and painted all my blues into all 30 pages as one step, then mixed and painted my crimsons. The negative space is white. Red, white and blue. Happy 4th of July.