Making color in books.

The term "full color" means that the original art is created in some medium and then photographed with a special camera that makes pictures that show the red, yellow, blue, and black parts of the art. This is called "separating" the colors and the camera is called a color separation camera. The four pictures that the camera makes become the plates used on the printing press to reproduce the painting.

In the late 70's when I started making books, "full color" reproduction of art was extremely expensive, so beginning artists were usually given a choice of black and white or some small number of separated colors for their books. The artists had to create the separations themselves to avoid the expense of the separation camera. I would create a black line or halftone (shaded) drawing, then produce an overlay for each color. These overlays would be drawn in black or gradations of black and would be "shot" in black and white (thus eliminating the color separation camera).

The overlays for a page from Tortoise and the Hare show how this works. The black and white drawings that I drew for the blue, red, and yellow overlays are shown in the left column. If something in the final drawing was going to be red (like the Tortoise's sandals or the Hare's scarf, I drew it dark grey in the red overlay. Notice how the green parts of the tortoise show up in the yellow and blue overlays because yello + green = blue. The orange part of the Tortoise shows up in the yellow and red overlays because yellow + red = orange. There is also an interactive example.

The scary part of this process was that I would never see the art in color until the book was printed. The yellow overlay would look like a black piece of art on stiff tracing paper or white paper and then would be printed in yellow ink on press. So if you wanted orange you needed to paint the desired object (in black or shades of gray) on the yellow overlay and the red overlay and this would be orange when printed.

Obviously, mistakes were made. Colors looked sort of funny or odd because illustrators actually never viewed their art in color until it was printed!

Today, the technology is much more advanced, and much less expensive. Therefore all work (I believe) is painted or drawn in color like a fine art piece and then separated, thus giving the artist much more control over the look of the final book.