A modern Christmas book made in collaboration with Adam Carlill, author of Psalms for the Common Era.
Listening to the music and reading the related Bible verses, the lyrics inspired the illustrations that I created. I translated the characters and places into 21st century, keeping the perceived emotions of the scenes intact. The individual explanations of each image are at the back of the book.
I created the illustrations first by painting the background image with oil colours, typically up to 3 layers. Then, I transformed the image with Adobe Capture into a duplicate 'blurred' image, keeping the original file. I used Photoshop to find the outlines required, and layered the partially masked blurred images with the original ones in InDesign. Finally, I drew the characters with permanent markers (Sharpies), used Adobe Capture to find the black and white outlines, coloured them in with Photoshop and added to the InDesign file used to create the book layout.
The colours have been taken from the book paintings using Adobe Color. I've used the same colour matches throughout the book.
The gold depicted in the images is 24ct gold leaf. If you look closely, I have re-used some of the gold images across different pages (e.g. the halo originates from the same gold leaf; albeit it sometimes rendered differently depending on the final image.
The book cover was created from the first book image about Saint Luke.
Now available on Amazon.
Book cover
Paperback front cover
Paperback full cover (front & back with spine)
InDesign process
Original paintings
Selected images
