On drips and newspapers

Last week the major project was turning some rainwater droplets in a stock shot into paint drips for a trade show booth. Assistant Lugs was plugging away at the Jazz newsletter. She finished the rough layout, had it approved and started refining it on a page by page basis. She also helped me on the drips. Drawing path selections for over a thousand drips is quite time consuming. The job happened quite quickly. I uploaded the final art to an ftp site and then they send it off to the States to be turned in to the backdrop for a display booth.

Toward the end of the week I was doing many newspaper separations of whisky bottles, drinks and mood shots for a newspaper insert. These images are always a challenge, largely because they are often dark but also because it is very difficult to achieve the rich colours of some of the drinks with only a maximum ink density of 240. You have to be creative with it. Even though doing newspaper separations might seem boring, the challenge of making it look as good as possible is enjoyable.

It will still look like crap when it hits the newspaper, no matter what you do. But it will be good crap, or at least better than what might have been had you not tinkered with it.