As a personal retouching project to learn Affinity Photo, I colorized a reproduction of an old art contest entry I illustrated at the age of 11. I won 1st prize in the 10–12 age group, bragging rights to the cover of this Kmart publication and a blurb inside. The snowman in my drawing was inspired by a music album cover, while Santa and his reindeer might've been inspired by a different album cover, I can't remember.
Originally drawn with color markers, my artwork printed in black & white—a disappointment to say the least. The original was never returned but the old magazine survived.
I scanned the tabloid-sized magazine using a descreen option of 133. Without descreening, the scanner faithfully reproduces the printed dots of the line screen, which creates unsightly moiré. Unfortunately, descreening softens the image, but it’s not a huge sacrifice in this case because the source lacks high detail.
This is what I started with. The first task was to paint out all the fills, leaving me with just outlines.
My personal directive with this project—in as much as the source would enable—was to maintain the integrity of the original marker strokes, warts and all. The trick is to isolate every unique hue from the outline. This means lots of Layers, Masks and Adjustment Layers. Affinity Photo’s Brush Tool was instrumental.
Composite showing original grayscale scan, outlines only, and colorization.
Including Groups, Adjustments and Masks, there are just over 300 layers in this job! Layer management & naming is essential.
The printed magazine yielded an unappealing muddy reproduction. Comparatively, digital manipulation reveals a pleasing monochrome image. This quick conversion uses a simple Black & White Adjustment Layer, and it’s pretty good all by itself. But if finer control & contrast is needed to enhance the marker strokes, I could employ HSL Adjustment Layers on every separate hue layer.
The title was drawn in Affinity Designer. I found an incomplete sample font suitable as a guide for customizing. However, when “outlined” (or in Designer parlance; “Convert to Curves”) it exposed a nasty abundance of points, making modification impractical and a complete redraw necessary. Designer’s Pen Tool is similar to Illustrator. It has tricks of its own and is pleasurable to use but required a brief retraining period. InDesign handled assembly.
When I was a child mom always said, “sign your work”, but I forgot and she didn’t catch it either. No problem, I scanned my handwriting from a different illustration of that period. Incidentally, that's not a smiley face on the descender of the g, it's a Jack-O-Lantern—this signature is from a Halloween illustration.
Blurb on the inside of magazine.
A year before I illustrated Kmart Christmas, I drew a similar scene for my school, and its retouch is also in my Behance portfolio. For comparison, here's both 78 and 79. On the left is my original, meaning the source image I started with, on the right is the retouch in Affinity Photo.
