These binders contain the watercolor paintings that are finished and await being installed into the books. There are a dozen or so more paintings to be included in these binders, but that is it for the illustrations. I have eleven more binders like these, containing the all artwork that has been used in this Illustrated Storybook Collection.
Installing this artwork involves; first defining the sketches requires, then once they are composed properly, scanning the sketches and filing the scans away properly, then opening the digital sketches in Photoshop and proceeding to prepare the digital copy to be painted (cleaning up the extraneous lines, fixing rough edges and lines), then printing the digital B&W sketch out on watercolor paper. The sketches are then painted with watercolors, rescanned, cleaned up again, removed from the background, and processed to enhance the color, brilliance, contrast & exposure. Then the individual drawings are assembled into a composite illustration, that illustration is reduced and inserted on the appropriate page.
Whew! It's a lot of work !
Just taking a wild guess, I'd say each of the 768 pages of the collection uses, on average, six paintings for the illustration, often times more than that, sometimes many more. That's at least 5,000 watercolor paintings that cost around $500 a piece to produce. In other words, the paintings used in this collection of books has cost approximately $2.5m and around fifteen years to produce.
I better sell a lot of books to make up for that expenditure!
When the books are finished and published, we will be moving to convert these paintings (of the characters) into 3D files for animation.
To say nothing of the stage production!
Does it ever end ? I hope so, I want to work on my cars. AG
