Uncle Lubin - experiments with colour palettes

I’m a big fan of the ligne claire¹ illustration style, which is basically clear strong lines filled with flat colour. I am also a fan of the eccentric drawings of Heath Robinson.

¹ I think my love of this style comes from the fact that I was a huge fan of TinTin as a child. Still am in fact. Hergé is credited with being the pioneer of the style.

² I used the marvellous Procreate app on the iPad to do the colouring, and then modified it in Photoshop.

Heath Robinson wrote and illustrated three children’s books. The first one was called The Adventures of Uncle Lubin, and was published in 1902. It contains some wonderful black and white line drawings. Not ligne claire style exactly (they contain hatching and shading) but lovely none-the-less. I decided to try colouring three of them, to experiment with different styles of brightness and colour saturation².These are my experiments.

In this version I reduced the saturation of the colours by 35%, and increased the brightness by 50%. This is my favourite one I think.

This is the original version, as published in 1902

This version has fully saturated colours. It’s too gaudy for my liking.

The colour increased in brightness by 50%

The colour saturation decreased by 50%

Both the colour saturation decreased by 50%, and the brightness increased by 50%

Uncle Lubin charming the snake

Uncle Lubin sleeps whilst the baby is taken by a bird. I’ve just noticed I neglected to do the buttons on his coat or the belt buckle.